One of the most ubiquitous and generic features of the contemporary American landscape, highways are also key symbols of contemporary American culture and a social institution in their own right. Together with cheap fuel and mass ownership of automobiles, highways facilitated the transformation of dense, central cities into sprawling metropolitan regions and allowed for decentralization of residential, commercial and industrial functions amongst a diffuse network of suburbs and edge cities.

Although imagined in Europe, the idea of paved, grade-separated, limited-access thoroughfare for the exclusive, high-speed use of trucks and automobiles was first realized in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1920s, the network of paved inter-urban thoroughfares was virtually non-existent. By the Second World War, the United States was linked by an extensive network of “national roads,” financed by an excise tax on gasoline. Highway construction received even greater support after the war. State and federal governments subsidized the construction of multi-lane highways to relieve urban traffic congestion and to link the growing suburban frontier with central cities. In 1956 under President Dwight Eisenhower the Interstate Highway Act committed the federal government to paying 90 percent of the cost for the construction of 42,000 miles of high-speed multilane highways linking major urban centers. Of greater scale and capacity than their pre-war predecessors, these thoroughfares became known as “expressways.” Expressways radically restructured the built environment. In virtually every major American city these new highways ran through and/or completely demolished poor minority neighborhoods. Together with urban renewal, highway construction displaced millions of Americans in the late 1950s and 1960s, and helped spur disinvestment in urban real estate. Although designed to facilitate the commutating of suburban residents to urban centers during the 1970s and 1980s, highways helped to siphon off factories, shopping malls and office space to the suburban fringes of metropolitan areas. By the late 1980s, the perimeter or beltway highways that had been originally designed to redirect through traffic around central cities had emerged as America’s new Main Street. Yet, despite the continual augmentation of highway capacity traffic volume and congestion expanded to fill, and exceed, the available space.

The energy crisis of the 1970s did little to reduce highway use. Indeed, in the twentyfive years following the oil embargo of 1973–4, highway congestion, suburban sprawl and pollution reached new levels. Despite various control devices, auto emissions remained the nation’s leading cause of air pollution. Environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act would seemingly require alternatives to the unlimited low-density vision of growth of the previous six decades, yet little consensus emerged on how to wean the United States from its unwholesome addiction to automobile use and highway construction. Instead, they are part of American culture—from James Dean to Bladerunner—as well as a threat to American life.