U.S. Interstate Highways’ Effects on the Environment

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The U.S. system of cross-country highways came into being when President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. On June 30 of that year the New York Times reporter John Morris wrote of the event, “President Eisenhower set into motion a record $33,480,000,000 road-building today by signing the bipartisan authorization bill that Congress sent him Tuesday. Sinclair Weeks, secretary of commerce, immediately announced the allocation of $1,125,000,000 among the states for the first year of what he called ‘the greatest public-works program in the history of the world.’ ” Secretary Weeks may have overstated the magnitude of the 42,000-mile (67,592-km) highway network to be built, but the interstate system nevertheless made an impact on lifestyles and businesses for years to come.

The U.S. interstate highways provided a different type of roadway from state roads and local thoroughfares because the entire network contained only about 16,000 interchanges that drivers use for entrance or exit. This design made travel more efficient for drivers by avoiding traffic lights and busy intersections. As the highways reached across the nation
throughout the 1950s and 1960s, they also began to exert a subtle effect on the environment.

The interstates—north-south routes have increasing odd numbers from west to east; even-numbered east-west routes increase from south to north—made personal travel, business trips, and trucking more convenient and faster. The interstates improved travel so much in fact that they contributed to urban sprawl from city centers; densely populated suburbs have grown up near many interchanges. Though the interstate highways made life easier for communities and commerce, they also led to the following environmental issues:

1. car and truck exhaust
2. animal and plant habitat destruction
3. animal and plant habitat fragmentation
4. blocked wildlife migration corridors
5. wildlife road kills
6. noise
7. high fuel consumption

In addition to the environmental ills mentioned here, the interstate highways have probably helped build the U.S. car culture in which more people depend on personal cars than on mass transit. The highways surely changed the way American society matured between the 1950s and 1970s as people became more mobile and the country seemed to become
smaller. (Interstate highways also gave birth to the fast food restaurant industry.) The National Geographic writer Robert Paul Jordan said of the interstate system at the height of its construction, “Americans are living in the midst of a miracle. A giant nationwide engineering project—the Interstate Highway System—is altering and circumventing geography on an unprecedented scale.” Jordan’s description captured the importance
of today’s interstate highways, but the highway system’s progress also brought with it a decline in the health of the environment.