The Grim Reaper of Small Towns
(Source: Library of Congress.)
My first Strong Towns staff retreat took place in Oklahoma City, where the team met to talk about everything “Strong Towns.” On the last day, mere hours before our flights took off, my colleague Shina and I decided to visit The National Cowboy Museum. It was a great step into the old Wild West, where we saw interesting colored boots, lifelike statues, amazing artwork, and so much more.
Also in the museum, we stumbled across the following display about interstate highways. It showed paved roads carving through the landscapes, causing the death of a once crucial place: the small town.
Interstate highways, an innovation constructed to pave quicker, more convenient ways to travel around the United States, resulted in harmful consequences for small towns. These communities were forgotten and turned to ghost towns as the economic flow of travelers flew by on monstrous interstate roads, with no nearby exit to a place that may have once been a regular stop.
Ghost towns are an eerie, somewhat beautiful fossil record of lives long forgotten in a quest for the new. This image is of a deserted truck stop located in Sierra Blanca, which was effectively wiped off the map when the interstate highway bypassed it in Hudspeth County, Texas.
(Source: Library of Congress.)
In 1956, Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act with the promise to construct 41,000 miles of highway system to connect 42 state capital cities and link 90% of American cities with populations over 50,000. It was to be the largest infrastructure project in the U.S., a great feat that would drastically change the shape of our country.
Design standards for interstate highways made it so traffic could only enter and exit on designated ramps to keep traffic flowing. While this was great for efficiency and speed, many small towns with a population under 50,000 were bypassed. Over time, these small towns were forgotten.
A little place that a traveler may have once stopped for a pause in their travels became a few houses in the distance, far out of the way from a primary destination. Those traveling on the main interstate highways would likely need to detour onto other roads to make a visit, which would generally not be very cost effective for the individual, especially as gas stations and fast food chains popped up around exits. Without the presence of travelers stopping at a local diner or gas station, many small towns withered and were abandoned by their residents for bigger cities with better opportunities.
Interstate highways didn’t just affect small towns, urban communities were destroyed as huge cement slabs tore through cities, displacing thousands. A system that was designed to connect America came at the cost of dividing America. New York University law professor Deborah N. Archer noted that these highways uprooted primarily black communities in her article “White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes: Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction.”
Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented that the highway expansion “wasn’t just physical—it ripped a culture, it ripped who we were.”
Bulky concrete highways cut through neighborhoods and disrupted the already established pedestrian landscapes. Places of worship were lost, green space was replaced with asphalt for fast-moving cars, and homes were torn down. Small businesses were destroyed by the expansion, meaning jobs and crucial, locally circulated money was eradicated.
Amidst all this destruction within cities and the death of many small towns, this progressive expansion of highways created a more travel-worthy United States by connecting local economies and individuals across the nation. Before building interstate highways it was a true and dangerous adventure to travel across the country by car. Only a brave few would leave the comfort and stability of a train to voyage on uncertain roads.
President Dwight Eisenhower claimed this intensive infrastructure was “essential to the national interest.” In many ways, it truly was. Dwight D. Eisenhower (at the time a Lieutenant Colonel) reported on a cross-country trip in 1919 where 79 military vehicles set out to determine just how difficult driving from coast to coast would be for military logistics purposes.
(Source: ArcGIS StoryMaps.)
They departed from Washington, DC, on July 7 with a route taking them on the most developed roads at the time. Each day, they concentrated their waking hours on driving, and it took them till September 6—62 days after their departure from the White House—to reach their final destination in San Francisco, California.
The report detailed how roads were impassible at times. Gas stations were far and few between, so there needed to be a strategic plan during a long journey. Sometimes roads were too narrow and they had to calculate how to pass oncoming vehicles. Or bridges would be too short, and they’d have to disassemble them to get trucks through. Not all the main roads were paved, so there were issues with getting stuck and needing to maneuver through dangerous areas. The total time of the journey reveals that the average travel speed would have been 5.65 mph, a strikingly slow speed for what was considered a main highway route at the time.
The interstate highway system changed how Americans lived. Independent travel became more possible and those working inside the city didn’t necessarily have to live there anymore with motorized commuting being a viable option. Food could be transported fast enough for it to stay fresh, which was great especially if one area suffered from an environmental catastrophe that harmed the crops.
There were a wide array of benefits to this web of roads in the time of their construction, but this advancement came at a detrimental cost to many people and they suffered greatly for it. We’ve learned that if we continue to build more, we will continue to effectively decimate communities and environments.
To this day people continue to battle against unnecessary highway expansions that will not promote economic development or improve the quality of life. For instance, we recently covered how in El Paso, Texas, TxDOT is wanting to widen an interstate highway at the expense of the city's downtown—and there are many other similar cases around the country. It’s evident that continuing to build more and larger roads is not going to solve the issue of traffic; instead it will only induce more demand for driving and cause damage to communities, as well as increase air pollution and noise.
If we want to stop destroying our places, then we need to stop expanding our roads, and we need to embrace traffic congestion, not fight it. As Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn often says: "we have already reaped the main benefits of the interstate system (connecting places across the country for the flow of goods and people). Building more is only doing harm. We can't get any more value out of this system—just destruction.”
Our focus has been on prioritizing the ease of transportation for those in motorized vehicles at peak driving hours, and we have advanced to the point that if we continue on this path we will only bring about unnecessary destruction and debt to our communities. It’s time to prioritize people and build with the idea that driving is not always the best option for everyone.
Seairra Jones serves as the Lead Story Producer for Strong Towns. In the past, she's worked as a freelance journalist and videographer for a number of different organizations. She currently resides between small-town Illinois and the rural Midwest with her husband, where they help manage a family homestead. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our towns stronger, you can find her outside working on the farm, writing fictional tales in a coffee shop, or reading in a hammock.