The Interstate Highway System forever changed this country but it wasn’t as big a slam dunk in the beginning as you’d expect. Ultimately, the vision that Eisenhower had came to fruition in the form of roads heading in every conceivable direction around the nation. Proposed for defense purposes, there were millions, billions even, more benefits than just the ability to move trucks and tanks quickly from one place to the next. The car companies were the huge winners here and they smelled the blood in the water and put a full court press on to get the Interstate Highway System funded and built.
This film made by GM is called “Give Yourself The Green Light” and it is a straight up lobbying piece designed to make anyone and everyone who saw it think that there was no other option but to support the Interstate System. Of course if this thing got built it was change people’s driving habits, change their wants and needs from a car to get around to one that could ferry them across the country. Mileage is money and mileage means people will buy cars more frequently.
We cannot say that we’re opposed to the viewpoint expressed in this video and we’re certainly thankful that the highway system got built. The one thing that no one could see coming is the generally crummy driving habits of those motorists you see on the interstate. There was no way to plan for that!
Cool propaganda film! There are even glimpses of Hot Rods like at 7:40.
The traffic on highways around here is almost as bad as it was in the 50’s before they were built. Huge population increase. An old timer friend told me on how it took several hours to get the 50 miles to the drags in the early 50’s. All roads with one lane each way, four way stops, through each town center.
The politics of building those highways is worthy of several more half hour videos, for instance the street Brian would take to get to Seattle, I90. For many years the interchange at I5 was unfinished, overpasses ended in mid air and you had to take several city streets to get between the two.
Then in Montana and South Dakota the highway zigs and zags to either go through or bypass the towns that would or wouldn’t bribe the politicians.