National transportation planning: Lessons from the U.S.Interstate Highways

Marlon G. Boarnet n

Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0626, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Available online 31 December 2013

Keywords:Transportation historyInterstate highwaysDeveloping countries

a b s t r a c t

As developing countries rapidly adopt the automobile, questions of how they should build transportationinstitutions and policies loom large. This paper interprets from the U.S. experience with national highwayconstruction, drawing several lessons that are pertinent both in developing and developed countries.In the U.S., the 1956 Interstate Highway Act codified a national road building program with centralized,federal leadership, financed by fuel taxes and hence designed to serve motorists, with little appreciationfor the resulting impacts on cities and metropolitan areas. The U.S. experience illustrates that nationaltransportation planning is best conceived as two systems – one inter-metropolitan and one intra-metropolitan– and that the institutions, goals, methods, and financing instruments for those two systems should differ.The U.S. institutions and policies were well suited to building a national, inter-metropolitan ground transportsystem, but are ill suited to the era of maintenance, externality management, and urban transportation thatfollowed.

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1. Introduction

This paper examines how the experience with highway devel-opment in the United States can, and cannot, inform transporta-tion lessons for other countries just now entering a period of rapidadoption of the automobile. Growth, development, and urbaniza-tion, most acutely in Asia and Africa, raise questions about howbest to adapt to increasing use of the automobile and the need fortransportation infrastructure in developing country contexts. Thequestion of how to build infrastructure, institutions, and financingsystems to support a booming transportation sector is similar tothe choices that the U.S. and other developed countries faced acentury ago when highway building in those nations was in itsinfancy.

The U.S., possibly because of its size and influence, is often heldup as an example on many topics, transportation policy included,and yet the details of the U.S. experience with highway construc-tion and related transportation institutions are rarely interpretedin a way that would be useful for developing nations. The intent ofthis paper is to examine the history of U.S. highway institutions,financing, and policy to draw lessons for developing countries thatare in circumstances similar to those in the U.S. before theconstruction of the Interstate Highway system.

This paper proceeds in the following steps. In Section 2, wesummarize U.S. highway history. That summary is not intended to

be exhaustive, but rather draws from longer and more compre-hensive accounts in the literature (e.g. Karnes, 2009; Rose, 1990;Gutfreund, 2004; Seely, 1987; Taylor, 2000) to lay the groundworkfor the analysis that follows. In Section 3, we analyze keydevelopments in the U.S. experience, highlighting what workedwell and which choices overlooked important issues or left thenation ill prepared for future challenges. In Section 4, we articulatelessons for developing countries based on the analysis of the U.S.experience.

2. U.S. highway history

The 1956 National Defense and Interstate Highway Act (here-after the Interstate Highway Act or the 1956 Act) allocated $25billion, from 1957 through 1969, for construction of the 41,000mile National System of Defense and Interstate Highways (Levin,1959; Rose, 1990; Taylor, 2000; Swift, 2011). The construction ofthe U.S. Interstate Highway system followed three quarters of acentury of debate and institutional development that transformedAmerican roads from a set of disconnected projects built andoperated by state and local governments into a comprehensivenetwork that was conceived, planned, and funded by the nationalgovernment.

From the late 1800s to the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, threequestions dominated highway politics. First, who would lead inhighway building, the federal government or the states? Second,who would pay for the new roads, or equivalently what financinginstruments would be used? Third, if there were to be a national

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Transport Policy 31 (2014) 73–82

system, how would it be planned, by whom, and using whatmethods? Eventually these questions were answered in favor ofstrong federal leadership for a national system funded by userfees, largely gasoline taxes. The national system was planned inwaves over several decades by the federal government's Bureau ofPublic Roads, which became an early leader in developing meth-ods, data sources, and planning techniques and which used thatleadership position to argue for a national system and to influencepolicy debate. The political questions of who would lead thehighway-building effort and who would pay were heated andthe outcome was never pre-ordained. From the early 1900s to the1956 Act, the U.S. developed a set of institutions that fostered thedevelopment of a highly professionalized community whichallowed rapid implementation of national highway constructiononce the political debates were settled. Yet those same institutionsthat proved adept at building the national system proved lesswell suited to the task of managing transportation in a post-construction era.

2.1. The early road building era: late 1800s to 1916

The late 1800s saw the development of what became a broadand active ‘Good Roads’ movement which was popular amongrural and agricultural interests. The movement pre-dated theautomobile – the first ‘Good Roads’ advocates were bicyclists –

but quickly came to focus on road building to support car travel(Gutfreund, 2004, pp. 8–10). Rural road building was viewed as away to empower farmers, by allowing them to move their goodsmore easily to market and to access multiple railheads, therebyreducing the local monopoly power of the railroads (Gutfreund,2004, p. 10).1 This emphasis on roads as a benefit to farmers wasan influential perspective in a rural nation; in 1900 sixty percent ofall Americans lived in rural areas.2

At the turn of the 20th Century, road building in the U.S. wasalmost exclusively an activity of state and local governments(Karnes, 2009, p. 7; Rose, 1990, Chapter 1). The first nationalhighway planning effort, the Lincoln Highway, was initiated in1913 by a group of private automobile enthusiasts with theintention of demonstrating the viability and importance of roadbuilding. This reflected the nascent debates about a federal role inhighway planning and construction, and as its proponents hopedthe Lincoln Highway promoted the idea of a national highwaynetwork (Weingroff, n.d.).

In 1905, the Office of Public Roads, was created within the U.S.Forest Service. Its role was to advise other agencies in mattersrelated to road construction and to build roads on U.S. federallyowned lands (U.S. FHWA, 2011).3

In 1916, the Federal Aid Road Act was passed. The bill providedthe first-ever federal financial assistance to states for road con-struction. Under the 1916 Act, federal funds were distributed tostates for road construction, typically following a 50:50 federal-state funding split. The federal funding was administered and

overseen by the Office of Public Roads and its successor the Bureauof Public Roads. The spirit of the legislation was intended to fosterfederal-state cooperation in road building, and the question ofwho would plan and lead in network design and construction wasstill unsettled. Yet the Office of Public Roads had authority tospecify engineering standards for roads that used federal funds,and that office and its successor agency, the Bureau of Public Roads(BPR), aggressively used that authority to codify standards, meth-ods, and practices to a national standard over the decades from1916 to the enactment of the 1956 Interstate Highway Act (Rose,1990; Seely, 1987).

2.2. The rise of national highway planning: 1918–1944

In 1918, Thomas H. MacDonald was named chief of the Office ofPublic Roads. In 1919 the office changed its name to the Bureau ofPublic Roads, and MacDonald remained as head of the bureau until1953 (U.S. FHWA, 2011a). MacDonald and the Bureau of PublicRoads (BPR) set the tone for the rise of a national highway system,and during the interwar years, between World Wars I and II,MacDonald emphasized the development of a culture that prior-itized knowledge development, analytic techniques, and objectiveanalysis (Seely, 1987; Gutfreund, 2004).

The 1921 Federal Aid Highway Act called for each state todesignate seven percent of their roads to be part of the federal aidhighway system – the first formalization of anything resembling ahierarchy of roads, with a national network receiving federalfunding. The BPR reviewed the state's suggestions and reservedthe right of formal approval, setting a precedent for federal selectionof roads and (eventually) routes that would be in the nationalhighway system (Seely, p. 74). Yet the BPR review of state sugges-tions was couched in the language of cooperation, aided by the BPR'sstatus as an advising agency and the bureau's growing reputation forexpertise in the still new methods of highway analysis and engi-neering (Seely, p. 56 and 74). In effect, the BPR was establishing thereputation and authority needed for national leadership well inadvance of the formal question of federal and state roles being fullysettled.

The interwar years also saw a shift from property tax togasoline tax finance. In 1921, approximately 70 percent of highwayfunds were generated by property taxes, and most early roadbuilding was financed by bonds repaid by states or localities withproperty tax revenues (Taylor, 2000, p. 203). In the 1920s, stateand municipal highway bond debt was increasing and some stateshit their limits for bonded indebtedness, creating pressure to findnew financing methods.4 During the Great Depression years, statesconsistently shifted their funding to fuel taxes, as car travel wasone of the few sectors that continued to grow during the 1930s(Taylor, 2000, p. 204). By 1948 fuel taxes raised more highwayrevenue than property taxes (Taylor, 2000, Fig. 4, p. 203; Brown et.al, 2009). Yet throughout this time period, state and federal gas taxrevenues were typically allocated to the general fund, creatingconstant arguments about the appropriateness of fuel taxes thatwere diverted to non-highway uses. Highway interests consis-tently argued that fuel taxes should be user fees allocated only tohighway construction, and the topic of diversion of gas tax fundsto non-highway uses was a constant and unsettled fixture ofpolitical debate (see, e.g., Rose, 1990, p. 9 and 32).

In 1934, Congress passed the Hayden-Cartwright Act, whichspecified that states could lose some or all of their federal aidhighway funds if they excessively diverted gas tax revenues tonon-highway uses (Schwartz, 1976, p. 420). The 1934 Act did not

1 Many commentators have used the phrase that road building, during thisearly era, was intended to “get the farmer out of the mud,” which was a popularphrase from the early automobile era, reflecting the fact that the systemwas largelyun-surfaced and that farmers were seen as primary beneficiaries of roads in thisperiod. See, e.g., Levin (1959) and Swift (2011) for discussions.

2 Data on percentage rural are from the U.S. Census Bureau, Urban and RuralPopulation, 1900–1990, http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/urpop0090.txt, accessed July 18, 2011.

3 Building roads on federal lands was a substantial responsibility. Much of theU.S. land area is owned by the federal government, and was in the early 1900s.Today, 20 percent of the land area of the United States is federally owned, primarilyin national parks, national forests, and other preserves, and in the western statesthe percentage of federally owned land is even higher (U.S. Bureau of the Census,2011, Table 365).

4 For example, see the description of the highway bond crisis in Arkansas inMoore (2006, pp. 19–20).

M.G. Boarnet / Transport Policy 31 (2014) 73–8274

forbid diversion, but required states to spend at least the portionof gas tax revenues on highways that had been spent in 1934.5 Yetthe 1934 Act reflected a growing sentiment that gas tax fundsshould not be diverted away from highway uses, a sentimenteventually reflected in the highway trust fund of the 1956 InterstateHighway Act.

In 1939, the BPR developed a plan for a national highwaynetwork. Following precedents that dated to 1921, the Bureausolicited input from the states while at the same time developinganalytic criteria that would be used to determine if state sugges-tions would be included in the national plan. The 1939 reportcontinued and strengthened the role of the federal government asthe arbiter of which routes would be in the national system. Statescould suggest routes, but the BPR made the final route selections(Seely, 1987, Chapter 4).

The BPR updated the 1939 plan in 1944, and the 1944 nationalhighway system was included as part of the 1944 Federal AidHighway Act. Yet the 1944 Act allocated no funds to build thesystem (Rose, 1990, p. 26). While MacDonald aspired to actuallybuild a system, not simply plan one, funding was not sufficient foranything close to the scale needed during the latter years of theGreat Depression (Rose, 1990, pp. 10–11). World War II divertednational attention to military matters (Rose, 1990, pp. 12–13). Thequestion of building the system, and the settling of the politicalquestions of leadership (federal or state) and funding would haveto wait until after the war.

2.3. Going backwards: 1944–1955

Postwar prosperity led to a substantial increase in driving andhighway-related commerce (Rose, 1990, Chapter 3). That increaseexacerbated the gap between U.S. highway needs and availablefunds. Federal highway spending had been largely suspendedduring World War II, leading to a backlog of maintenance andconstruction needs (Rose, 1990, Chapter 3). Yet funding for high-ways decreased as a percent of gross national product (GNP) afterthe war. Karnes (2009, p. 88) states that before World War II, the U.S. spent 1.4 percent of GNP on roads, while in the years immedi-ately after World War II the nation spent 0.2 percent of GNP onroads. The nation, it seemed was going backwards.

The 1920s and 1930s political consensus in favor of highwaybuilding was also fraying. Everyone agreed that highways werevitally needed, but groups were increasingly viewing policy choicesthrough their own particular lenses. Trucking organizations arguedthat state gasoline taxes should be dedicated to highways, with nodiversion, and that the federal tax on gasoline should be eliminatedand federal aid for a national highway system should be providedfrom general revenues (Rose, 1990, Chapter 3, p. 30). States wereincreasingly taking the lead in highway building, and the morepopulous states began to argue that they should plan and build theirown networks in advance of or even in lieu of a national system(Rose, 1990, Chapter 5). Lacking sufficient tax revenues, states wereincreasingly building toll roads, to the dismay of trucking interests(Rose, 1990, p. 41). The toll roads drew continued opposition fromMacDonald, who had always favored free highways, but evenMacDonald had begun to soften his opposition to tolls in the faceof the evident gap between highway needs and available revenues(Seely, pp. 205–207).

The political debate during these years was particularlyunsettled. The old questions of federal or state leadership andfinancing methods had been moving toward a resolution of federal

leadership with gasoline tax finance in the 1930s, but thatconsensus was coming undone. The national highway systemplanned by the BPR looked more and more like a pipedream –

by the early 1950s engineers estimated that California's portion ofthe network would require 30 years for completion (Rose, 1990, p.32). Materials costs were rising due to the postwar housingconstruction boom, and in 1950 President Truman reduced high-way spending as part of an effort to avoid shortages of materialsneeded for the Korean War (Rose, 1990, Chapter 3). State officialsincreasingly looked poised to embark on their own plans. Pro-spects for a national system appeared bleak until matters wereresolved, surprisingly quickly, in 1955 and 1956.

2.4. The Interstate Highway era, 1956–1970s

In January of 1955, President Eisenhower used his State of theUnion address to argue in favor of a national system of roads(Karnes, 2009, p. 87). Congress continued to debate questions offinancing instruments, with Republicans largely favoring bondedindebtedness, while other voices argued for a ‘pay-as-you-go’approach (Karnes, 2009, p. 90). Congressional debate also focusedon whether an expanded federal effort would interfere with thestates' prerogatives and plans (Karnes, 2009, p. 90; Rose, 1990,Chapter 6). Further complicating efforts to pass a bill, proposals touse gasoline taxes to create the Highway Trust Fund – whichwould dedicate gas tax revenues only to highway construction –

were failing to gather support from urban legislators. The decadesof focus on highways as a rural project had helped create theimpression that a national highway program would siphon gaso-line taxes from urban areas, and that concern was reinforced bythe fact that parts of the urban portion of the Interstate System, asof 1954, were not specifically sited, partly in deference to localofficials. To make the system more real to urban legislators, theBPR embarked on a hurried effort to designate the location of theurban interstates, in time for Congressional debate in 1956 (Taylor,2000).

The political debates were settled in 1956. The 1956 InterstateHighway Act provided plenty of new roads, with gasoline taxfinance on a sufficiently broad base not to be onerous to any oneinterest group. The federal government would pay 90 percent ofInterstate Highway costs – an unprecedented share and largeenough to ensure that states, rather than being concerned aboutfederal control, would enthusiastically support the bill. Urbanportions of the Interstate network had been explicitly sited, whichwas necessary to obtain the votes of urban members of congress.The inclusion of specific routes for the urban highways was donepartly at the behest of city leaders and their congressionalrepresentatives (Schwartz, 1976, p. 435), but the effect was tocodify a planning process that had been centralized in Washington(Taylor, 2000).

The Interstate Highway system was financed by increasing thefederal gasoline tax from two to three cents per gallon (Levin,1959). That 50 percent increase in the fuel tax rate, when coupledwith increased driving, increases in other fees (e.g. taxes on tires),previous tax increases and changes in state gasoline taxes, had adramatic effect. Revenues for highways (state and federal)increased by 381 percent from 1947 to 1959 (Taylor, 2000).The 1956 Act required that the federal funds be expended onlyon the national highway system, through the creation of theHighway Trust Fund which isolated fuel tax revenues from thegeneral fund (Levin, 1959), settling the question of diversion ofgasoline tax funds. The initial effect was a revenue windfall, as hadbeen intended to finance the new system.

The 1956 Act called for federal standards and federal oversight,codifying the tradition of federal leadership in cooperation with

5 See the statement of President Franklin Roosevelt upon signing the Hayden-Cartwright Act, at The American Presidency Project (n.d.). Also see Schwartz (1976,p. 420).

M.G. Boarnet / Transport Policy 31 (2014) 73–82 75

the states built for decades by the BPR. The 1956 InterstateHighway Act specified the routes, even within cities, and cappedthe extent of the system at 41,000 miles. The 1956 Act required thenew Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to promulgatestandards for the Interstates. The states provided guidance,formulating standards through the American Association of StateHighway Officials (AASHO), which were then adopted by theFHWA (Kaszynski, 2000, p. 67). The 1956 Act required that statescontrol and limit access to the Interstate Highways, and the 1956Act included provisions for federal acquisition of needed right-of-way if state efforts to obtain land were unsuccessful (Levin, 1959,p. 383). The Interstate Highway Act allocated $25 billion of funding– a staggering sum – to be distributed according to a 9:1 federal-state matching rate (Levin, 1959, p. 381). The Interstate HighwayAct called for construction to occur between 1957 and 1969,providing the promise of rapid completion of the national network(Levin, 1959, pp. 380–381).

The nation mobilized in a massive effort to build the greathighways. California, for example, opened more freeway milesfrom 1957 through 1959 than it had built in all previous years, andcenterline highway miles in the state doubled again from 1960through 1964 (Taylor, 2000, p. 210). All the states enthusiasticallyparticipated. The question of federal or state leadership had beensettled in favor of the federal government. Interstate Highwayconstruction, and with it much of ground transportation planning,became a highly centralized endeavor, funded and specified fromWashington and implemented by state departments of transpor-tation (Taylor, 2000, pp. 207–208).

In many ways, the 1956 Interstate Highway Act was a triumph ofprofessional policy analysis over politics. MacDonald was gone, butthe culture he had worked to build, of a federal agency steeped incutting edge methods of data collection, analysis, and engineering,with broad ties to other agencies, the states, and political actors,was the basis for the 1956 Act. MacDonald's principles of federalcontrol of route selection, national standards, a national network,and gasoline tax financing were the centerpieces of the law.Possibly more important, the decades-long effort by the BPR todevelop and disseminate knowledge-based approaches to highwayplanning and construction had built a professional community thatwas ready to quickly build the national network, using acceptedmethods of analysis and federal standard-setting, once politicalquestions had been settled. The network was built quickly, but bythe 1970s questions of what would follow after the constructionwas complete began to loom large, and in many ways caught thenation unprepared.

2.5. The post-Interstate era, 1970s to the present

The old political questions had been settled in the 1956 Act,largely in ways agreeable to all the major interests, and thenational effort to build the Interstate System proceeded apace.Yet once the network was built, the highly centralized, federallycontrolled process increasingly became the subject of criticism.In the past four decades, authority for highway policy has slowlydevolved from the federal government back to states and local-ities, and the focus of transportation policy has expanded toinclude broader issues of urban transportation, neighborhoodimpacts, alternatives to gasoline tax financing, and externalitymanagement.

The role of the Interstate Highways on urban areas had beenmostly overlooked in the national planning for the 1956 Act (Taylor,2000). Similarly, questions of air quality did not loom large at thetime. Further institution building, both at the metropolitan leveland for environmental management, proved necessary.

Federal law required metropolitan area transportation plansbeginning in 1962 (Dilger, p. 74), and the 1977 Clean Air Act

Amendments first required that metropolitan transportationplans be consistent with the state air quality improvement effortsthat are required by federal law (U.S. FHWA, No date). Yet in the1960s and 1970s those requirements did not translate into any-thing other than a very weak role for metropolitan area planning,as the locus of transportation planning and funding was still atthe state and federal level. The role of metropolitan planningorganizations (MPOs) was strengthened by the 1991 IntermodalSurface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) – a bill which inmany ways is the break between the centralized highway con-struction period and the era of maintenance and decentralizedplanning and programming which followed. Under the 1991ISTEA, six percent of federal aid highway funds (the revenuesfrom the federal gas tax) were allocated directly to MPOs forprojects of MPOs choosing that did not require state approval(Dilger, 1994) – the first time federal gas tax funding went to anysub-national entity other than state transportation departmentsand the first time MPOs could use federal funds for projectswithout state approval.

While this strengthened the role of MPOs, the result is far froma formal metropolitan governance structure for transportation.MPOs still lack taxing authority, and in most instances still have noauthority to program or implement their own projects. MPOs donot have land use authority. MPOs are essentially aggregators ofprojects specified both by states and by county and municipalgovernments (see, e.g., the discussion in Gerber and Gibson (2009,esp. pp. 635–636)). MPOs can have important coordinating and, insome cases, agenda setting functions, but in the U.S. metropolitantransportation decision-making is still made, depending on thestate, either primarily at the state level or, in the more urbanizedstates, at the municipal level often with state input, direction, orconstraints.

While the local and metropolitan role was slowly becomingstronger, the gasoline tax finance system of the 1956 InterstateHighway Act was coming under increasing pressure. Gasoline taxrevenues, at both the state and federal level, did not keep pace withdriving or highway construction costs (Taylor, 2000). Increasedvehicle fuel economy, mandated by the federal government in the1970s, widened the gap between gas tax revenues and miles driven,and the cost of building highways in urban areas increased fasterthan gas tax revenues in part due to increases in urban right-of-wayand construction costs (Taylor, 2000). Political pressure made itincreasingly difficult to raise the gasoline tax, which is assessed on aper-gallon basis rather than as a percent of total fuel costs (andhence has no indexing for inflation). The federal gas tax was lastincreased in 1993 (Brown et al., 2009).

In 2008, the Highway Trust Fund, for the first time since 1956,had insufficient funds to meet obligations, and Congress author-ized additional funds from general revenues (Weiss, 2008).As federal gas tax funds dwindled, localities began to fill the gap.As of 2005, 20 of the 58 California counties – and all of the largercounties in the state's four largest metropolitan areas – had passedlocal sales taxes to raise funds for transportation (Crabbe et al.,2005). In the greater Los Angeles area, the Southern CaliforniaAssociation of Governments estimates that 74 percent of the fundsfor their most recent) 5-year regional transportation plan will befrom local sources, of which the largest share is county sales taxincrements devoted to transportation (Southern CaliforniaAssociation of Governments, 2012).

On net, the post-Interstate Highway period has been character-ized by a strengthening of the role of MPOs, resulting in anincreased focus on urban, transit, and environmental aspects oftransportation policy, and the fraying of the gasoline tax financesystem. The more constrained federal funding role, coupled withthe rising role of urban issues, has led to decentralization ordevolution of what had been a highly centralized program (Rose,

M.G. Boarnet / Transport Policy 31 (2014) 73–8276

1990, p. xi). Some key developments are summarized in the nextsection.

3. Key developments

The U.S. developed a set of institutions and practices that werewell suited to the careful planning of a national highway network,and the rapid construction of that system once political debateswere settled. Yet the institutions and practices that were wellsuited to an era of construction have proved less suited to a post-construction era. First, consider what worked well in the U.S.experience.

3.1. What worked well: key factors supporting the constructionof the Interstate Highway System

3.1.1. Development of professional capabilitiesThe BPR saw their mission as, in part, knowledge and skill

creation and dissemination (Seely, 1987, e.g. pp. 103–105). The BPRpioneered methods of geometric design, data collection, and trafficand economic analyses (Seely, 1987, pp. 83–88 and 100–117).In 1922, the BPR cooperated in the first regional traffic countingprojects, in Chicago and Cleveland (Seely, 1987, p. 167). At BPRurging, by 1930 eleven states had traffic counting efforts underway(Seely, 1987, p. 167). The landmark work that led to the develop-ment of travel demand models was conducted by professors atColumbia University, with funding from the BPR (Mitchell andRapkin, 1954). When the time came to build the InterstateHighway System, the U.S. had been developing expertise, dataresources, and methods for four decades in a professional networkdispersed across state and federal agencies, university researchcenters, and the engineering community.

3.1.2. Alignment of Incentives to build a national highway networkFour characteristics of the 1956 Act established an incentive

structure that worked well for purposes of building a nationalhighway system. (1) The routes for the national highway systemwere selected by the federal government, continuing the practicethat the BPR had set decades earlier when it established itsprerogative to select which highways would receive federal aid.(2) The 1956 Act resulted in standards for geometric designs,engineering, and access restrictions, drawing on the traditionthat the BPR had established of federal leadership in highwayengineering, although following BPR tradition the engineeringstandards were developed with the cooperation of the states.(3) The national system was capped at 41,000 miles in the 1956Act, reducing states’ incentives to lobby to include additional roadsin the national highway system, as such lobbying would requirerevisiting the legislation to have any hope of success. (4) The largefederal funding share, 90% of construction costs, created enthu-siastic participation among state departments of transportation.

The net effect was that the national highway system, in itsphysical extent, routes, and design standards, was a centralizedproject built to federal specifications, and the massive infusion ofnew federal funds created a willingness on the part of statedepartments of transportation to cooperate in the national project.All four of the characteristics of the 1956 Act were necessary forthis alignment of incentives. A large federal funding share withouta network that was capped at 41,000 miles following specifiedroutes would have created powerful incentives for states to lobbyto include other, more locally-serving roads. Specifying the systemin detail while offering a smaller federal funding share might havecreated recalcitrance on the part of some states, particularly thosewith already well developed highway programs of their own. Thecombination of a large federal funding share and clear federal

control over a system whose physical extent was specified inlegislation was an excellent way to ensure that states cooperatedenthusiastically in the national project.

The ensuing consensus did not begin to fray until the initialconstruction period was well on its way to completion, circa thelate 1960s and into the 1970s.6 The construction of several urbanhighways prompted a backlash of public opinion against what hadpreviously been an almost universally highly regarded program.Citizen groups began to oppose particular urban segments of thenational highway plan (see, e.g., the discussion of opposition toproposed highways abutting the French Quarter in New Orleans,traversing Manhattan, and elsewhere in Lewis (1997, Chapter 8)).Often the opposition was based on local impacts, includingdisruptions to neighborhoods that would be severed by theurban segments of the national system. The incentive structurethat was well suited to building a national network that connectedmetropolitan areas was less well suited to managing within-metropolitan transportation needs. The local context that wasvital for within-urban-area transportation was not reflected in thehighly centralized national plan and its implementation under the1956 Act, and as the U.S. continued to urbanize this became anincreasingly important issue, discussed at greater length in thenext sub-section on ‘what did not work well.’

3.1.3. Choice of financing methodsRepeatedly from the 1930s to the 1956 Interstate Highway Act,

political actors argued that if fuel taxes were the primary financinginstrument, then highways should be designed to benefit motor-ists, who were paying for the roads (see, e.g., Rose, 1990; Seely,1987; Karnes, 2009, Chapter 6). Competing goals, such as usinghighways for urban revitalization, to bolster city economies, or astools to help spur redevelopment or improve land use, wereovershadowed by the argument that if motorists were paying,then the roads should be built to move traffic and not to serveother larger and yet (in the minds of the engineers who dominatedthese debates) more nebulous goals (see, e.g., Rose, Chapters 1 and2; Taylor, 2000).

Gasoline tax finance proved well suited to the task of roadconstruction, tapping a broad and rapidly growing tax base duringa period of rapidly increasing use of the automobile. The largeincreases in revenues created by the 1956 Act and the gas taxincreases that followed funded a massive construction program,the scale of which had not been seen. But gasoline tax finance alsoinadvertently sowed the seeds of the current fiscal crisis inAmerica's transportation system, and also cemented a ‘traffic only’view of highways that proved ill suited to the realities ofmetropolitan areas or the post-construction period that wouldfollow.

3.2. What did not work well: a nation unprepared for the erafollowing the construction of the Interstate Highways

3.2.1. Failure to conceive of two systems – inter-metropolitan andintra-metropolitan

For decades before the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, roadwaysin the U.S. were considered to be of two types – rural roads thatconnected farmers to markets, and urban streets to facilitatewithin-city travel. The two systems were quite distinct. Urbantravel was the domain of city officials, and traffic congestion was

6 As of September of 1967, 60 percent of the original Interstate Mileage (24,595miles) was open to traffic and another 15 percent (6046 miles) was underconstruction (FHWA, 1966, p. 166). Schwartz (1976, p. 444) notes that as of 1975,88 percent of the planned Interstate miles were open to traffic.

M.G. Boarnet / Transport Policy 31 (2014) 73–82 77

typically the primary urban transportation issue.7 Urban highwayplans were pursued aggressively in many cities before WorldWar II – examples include Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago,and Los Angeles. In describing those efforts, Taylor (2000) notesthat urban road planning was typically focused on multiple modes,tied to the land use character and the context of the city, and oftenplanned to disperse traffic through networks that would be moredense than the Interstate System that was eventually built butwith slower design speeds. The urban highway plans of the pre-1956 era were typically designed with attention to the context ofthe surrounding urban fabric. National planning – connectingcities across vast expanses of empty land – typically focused onproviding infrastructure, and questions of congestion managementor integration into nearby land uses were often viewed as beingmeaningless.8

Two developments led to a national highway system that,while having a large impact on cities, reflected little considerationof the complexities of intra-metropolitan travel. First, to pass the1956 Interstate Highway Act, federal officials determined thelocation of interstates within cities and metropolitan areas tomake the system tangible to urban legislators, and hence to obtaintheir votes (Schwartz, 1976; Taylor, 2000). Second, the highlycentralized nature of the 1956 Act, with routes and standardsspecified at the federal level and with a generous 90 percentfederal funding share, pushed aside the voices who were callingfor more context-sensitive, multi-modal urban transportationplans (Taylor, 2000). The amount of federal funding was too largefor states to do anything but enthusiastically build the nationalhighway network (Schwartz, 1976, p. 461). In addition, the legacyof gasoline tax finance and the view that the roads would servetraffic and not other goals, promulgated by decades of BPRengineering studies and advocacy, created a context where otherimpacts such as effects on mass transit systems, central cityeconomies, and urban neighborhoods were not considered. Thenational project, from 1956 to the mid-1970s, was to build theInterstate Highway system, and that project reflected the methodsand sensibilities of an inter-metropolitan focus with little appre-ciation for the ways in which transportation planning in congestedurban areas differed. Urban transport plans of the 1930s and 1940sthat focused on alleviating and dispersing congestion, integratingautomobiles with other modes, and building roadways withslower design speeds, less capacity, and hence requiring less landand being less disruptive to neighborhoods were pushed aside inthe enthusiasm of the Interstate Highway era (Taylor, 2000).

3.2.2. Metropolitan institutions were not considered in the 1956Interstate Highway Act

The 1956 Interstate Highway Act was a triumph of an inter-metropolitan vision over a metropolitan one. State highwaydepartments, the recipients of the massive increase in federalfunds, were empowered, and urban and metropolitan voices weremuted and left aside.

Perhaps ironically, the metropolitan institutions that exist inthe U.S. today were created as part of the renewal of the Federal-Aid Highway act in 1962, only six years after the 1956 InterstateHighway Act (Schwartz, 1976, p. 509). Transportation is arguablythe only U.S. domestic policy domain where metropolitan plan-ning is required by federal law. The BPR had long supportedmetropolitan studies. As early as 1922, the BPR cooperated in thefirst regional traffic counting projects, in Chicago and Cleveland

(Seely, 1987, p. 167). That history, combined with the fact thatfederal law required metropolitan highway planning as a condi-tion for highway funds only six years after the approval of theInterstate Highway Act (Schwartz, 1976, p. 461), creates a counter-vailing interpretation that metropolitan institutions, while admit-tedly constrained, may owe their existence to the InterstateHighway System in the U.S. In that view, the U.S. InterstateHighway System did not so much limit or overlook metropolitanplanning as it enabled such planning earlier than might haveotherwise occurred.9

Certainly metropolitan institutions in the U.S. are largely absentoutside of the transportation realm,10 and a nuanced view of U.S.highway history would see both barriers and seeds to metropoli-tan institutions throughout the century-long scope of federalinvolvement in national road building. Yet the terms of theInterstate Highway Act of 1956 had the strong effect of centralizingdecision-making and reducing the scope of independent city ormetropolitan action. Throughout the decades-long debate onhighway development in the U.S., the system had been viewedby the most decisive voices as inter-metropolitan (Schwartz, 1976,p. 416). The relatively hurried planning for the urban routes in1955 implied that the system would be built under strong federalleadership (Taylor, 2000; Schwartz, 1976, p. 435). Most impor-tantly, the length of the system and the routes were specified inthe 1956 Act, which, as Schwartz (1976, p. 461) notes, wasinterpreted as not only a cap on system length but an obligationto build the system as specified. Most metropolitan planningorganizations, in the early years of the 1960s, viewed the Inter-state System as a given (Schwartz, 1976, p. 461). That, combinedwith the fact that the 90 percent federal match was viewed bystate officials as too attractive to turn down,11 implied that thesystem, in its crucial first decade to decade and a half, was built onroutes specified as part of the 1956 Act, including the routeswithin cities that had been developed as part of the 1955 planning.

The city planning of that era, immediately after the 1956 Act,was muted not only due to these institutional factors, but alsobecause highways were widely regarded as a positive force inurban areas. Many planners assumed that highways would helprevive declining downtowns, and then-popular concepts of urbanrenewal, which involved ‘slum clearance’ and the removal oflow-income housing, were seen as consistent with and comple-mentary to highway construction (e.g. DiMento, 2009; Schwartz,1976, pp. 464, 473, and 474). In the years leading to the 1956 Act,cities at times lobbied for more urban highway miles to beincluded in the national plan (e.g. Heanue and Weiner, 2012, p.29). It was not until the mid-1960s, and more forcefully by theearly 1970s, that commentators and the public began to articulatea negative view of the impacts of highways on the nation's urbanareas (e.g. Schwartz, 1976, pp. 473–474).

There were a few contrary voices that anticipated impacts incities even in the early days of Interstate Highway construction,but only a few. A young scholar from the Northeast, Daniel PatrickMoynihan, was one of the critics of the urban impact of thenation's highway program. Moynihan (1960, p. 19) wrote criticallyof the new interstate program, lamenting the lack of attention toits affects on metropolitan areas. He said, ‘Highways determineland use, which is another way of saying they settle the future ofthe areas in which they are built.’ He predicted that, withoutmetropolitan planning agencies (virtually nonexistent in the U.S.

7 In California, until 1931, state highways ended at the borders of incorporatedcities, signifying the demarcation between the inter- and intra-metropolitansystems (Taylor, 2000, p. 204 and note 9).

8 The interpretation in this paragraph is based on Taylor (2000) and readers arereferred there for more detail.

9 I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this interpretation.10 The exceptions being regional infrastructure entities, often related to water

or power, and metropolitan air quality regulatory agencies.11 Schwartz (1976, p. 461) notes that in the 1960s governors of both California

and Massachusetts stated that they could not afford to turn down the 90 percentfederal funding share.

M.G. Boarnet / Transport Policy 31 (2014) 73–8278

at the time), the new highways would sever urban neighborhoods,leading to patterns of neighborhood decline and outlying growththat were unanticipated by most and hence would catch citiesunprepared. Years later, in 1991, while serving as Senator fromNew York, Moynihan authored the ISTEA act which brought asubstantial change in U.S. transportation policy, shifting the focusfrom road building to include maintenance, providing a role formetropolitan planning organizations in forecasting compliancewith the federal clean air act, and providing some federal fundsdedicated to congestion management and improved air quality.ISTEA, in effect, introduced elements of metropolitan planning intowhat had long been essentially a rural and inter-metropolitanprogram. Yet that effort to build effective metropolitan transporta-tion institutions still lags, and a legacy of the great highwayconstruction era is a still evolving landscape for metropolitantransportation planning, finance, and implementation.12

3.2.3. The fiscal crisis of gasoline tax financeThe user fee principle – embodied in the 1956 Interstate

Highway Act which allocated gasoline tax revenues to the highwaytrust fund – made sense for inter-metropolitan transportation.Yet severing the link between highway finance and propertyvalues in urban areas proved problematic in the long run. Urbantransportation infrastructure, by improving access, creates landvalue premia nearby.13 Improved transportation causes landvalues to rise, which will increase the cost of obtaining right-of-way for future infrastructure improvements or additional capacity.A property tax finance system can capture some of the increasedland value, and urban transportation systems before the U.S.Interstate Highway system had long been tied to land valuecapture. Examples include the early passenger rail systems thatsupported real estate development in the U.S. and Japan, which areexamples of land value capture in the private sector (see Bernickand Cervero, 1997, Chapters 2 and 12).

The problem of gasoline tax finance was obscured for years bythe initial windfall of revenues as fuel consumption, and hence thetax base, increased rapidly in the decades after World War II.Further obscuring the difficulty of gasoline tax finance was thefocus on inter-metropolitan travel. Building highways across vastexpanses of sparsely settled land to connect cities in a largecountry meant that the inter-metropolitan system faced few landprice pressures. In the open spaces between cities, the newhighways did not much increase land prices and the primarybeneficiaries were motorists, not land owners. The user feeconcept was well suited to the portion of the network that wasinter-metropolitan, and it was only the intra-metropolitan systemthat would face pressure under gasoline tax finance. Yet in 2012,66 percent of all vehicle miles traveled on the U.S. InterstateHighway system were on the urban portion of the network, withmost of those being within-metropolitan area trips.14 The short-comings of user fee finance are intimately tied to the fact that thenational highway system that was conceived as inter-metropolitan

in nature, motivated by rural needs and a concept of cross-countrytransport, became the backbone of the nation's metropolitantransportation systems.15

4. Lessons

4.1. Foster broad professionalization

The BPR example is a salient one. A national agency withresponsibility for thought leadership in transportation, and withan advising and knowledge dissemination role in addition to aplanning mission, would be helpful in developing country con-texts. The agency should be tasked to work cooperatively withsub-national governments, universities, and the private sector tobuild expertise throughout the country. The techniques pursuedwould differ in some ways from the methods of traffic counting,economic analysis, and highway geometric design pursued by theBPR. A modern-day national highway planning agency should be aleader in applying new technologies, including geographic posi-tioning system (GPS) tracking technology, intelligent sensing oftraffic, real-time methods for traffic management, and the applica-tion of advanced sensing technology to monitor the structuralintegrity of bridges and roads. Methods to assess the environ-mental footprint of vehicles, fuels, and projects and policies shouldbe developed, and the national agency should foster leadership inthe behavioral and policy aspects of transportation as well as inthe engineering aspects. Applications to travel demand estimation,traffic management, traffic safety, cost allocation, and economicanalysis should be studied and refined. More generally, the goalshould not be to isolate expertise in one agency, but to establish aleading voice for the development of highway planning skillsthroughout the country.

4.2. Shield the national planning function from direct politicalinfluence

Politics will always be a part of transportation planning.The stakes are too high for it to be otherwise. Yet the BPR madethe final decisions on the national highway system, including routeselection and the extent of the network, shielding those questionsfrom direct legislative influence.16 This proved useful, as states couldsuggest routes to the BPR but direct lobbying to include inefficienthighways in the national system was limited and generally ineffec-tive. Congressional debate in the U.S. focused on matters of policy –

tax instruments, matching grant formulae, and the relationshipbetween the federal government and the states.

This shielding required political influence on the part of the BPR.The BPR drafted legislation and influenced debate, but it did bothfrom a position of thought leadership (Seely, 1987). Following theBPR example, plans in other countries would also specify standardsfor network design and route selection. The plans should be basedon clear analytic criteria, refined over time, and the size of thenational network should be specified based on an analysis of needs.Unlike the BPR case, planning should allow voice for stakeholders,affected parties, and local areas – voices from those stakeholderswere lacking, muted, and often ignored in U.S. highway planning(e.g. Rose, 1990; Taylor, 2000). In short, while technical aspects ofnational highway planning should be shielded from politics, otheraspects (particularly impacts on neighborhoods that are inherent in

12 The barriers to effective metropolitan transportation planning extendbeyond the elements of the 1956 Interstate Highway Act and its implementation.Land use authority in the U.S. is fragmented across a large number of munici-palities, making coordination at the metropolitan level difficult. The 1956 Act didnot cause that and, as mentioned earlier, beginning in 1962 metropolitan planningwas a required if not particularly empowered part of highway policy. The difficultyis that the 1956 Act did not consider much role for metropolitan institutions untilwell into the Interstate Highway construction phase.

13 The theory is as old as the monocentric urban model, e.g. Alonso (1964). Forevidence of house price premia near new highways, see, e.g., Mohring (1961) andBoarnet and Chalermpong (2001).

14 FHWA (2013, Table 2) reports that in 2012 there were 245.2 billion vehiclemiles driven on the rural portion of the interstate highway system and 480.2 billionvehicle miles on urban interstate highways.

15 For a similar and more extended discussion of these ideas, see Taylor (2000).16 The BPR was not a neutral observer. MacDonald courted political decision-

makers, had legislation introduced at his urging or with his direction or input, andadvocated policy. Yet the analytic functions in the BPR were generally givenpolitical deference and shielded from electoral politics. See, e.g., Seely (1987).

M.G. Boarnet / Transport Policy 31 (2014) 73–82 79

the intra-metropolitan parts of the system) will require stakeholderinvolvement and hence a political framework.

The planning process should support a network hierarchy, with theinter-metropolitan trunk lines the responsibility of the nationalgovernment while feeder systems might appropriately be the domainof sub-national governments. Broader policy decisions should be thepurview of electoral politics, but a strong agency with expert stafftasked with making technical decisions should have the authority todetermine project and route selection as funds become available. Thiswill require that the national transportation planning agency havestrong political links, to ensure that their authority over the nationaltransportation plan is not subject to detailed political influence, butthose political links should be based as much as possible on afoundation of analysis and expertise. Yet for the part of the systemthat is within urban areas, politics will be necessarily trickier and, attimes, more necessary, leading to a need to conceptualize nationalhighway planning as, in effect, two endeavors, inter- and intra-metropolitan, from the start.

4.3. Plan for both inter-metropolitan and intra-metropolitan systems

Policy-makers should view transport infrastructure not as a setof possibly competing modal systems but as two systems, intra-metropolitan and inter-metropolitan, each with different contexts.The inter-metropolitan system is characterized by low and fallingtransportation costs, and the cost of land acquisition in rural areasis usually low, making capacity increases a sound choice toaccommodate traffic. Because a primary purpose of the inter-metropolitan system is to facilitate trade, keeping transport costslow is a reasonable goal for the inter-metropolitan system anduser-fee finance is appropriate. The interaction of transport infra-structure and economic development at the inter-metropolitanlevel is likely secondary to other factors, such as the location ofknowledge centers and resource stocks, and so coordinating landuse or location policy with inter-metropolitan transport invest-ment will often either not make much sense or will be a vainexercise.

The intra-metropolitan system, in contrast, is characterized bycongestion, high full costs of travel (time plus money cost), andlittle ability to expand capacity sufficiently to keep transport costslow. Hence the objective is rarely (if ever) to provide sufficientcapacity to meet demand, but rather to balance several modes,making progress when possible, and ideally, as e.g. Downs (1962,1992) and Vickrey (1963) have noted, to use pricing to managedemand. The interaction of urban land prices with transportationaccess not only allows coordination between land use and trans-portation policy but requires it, and that interaction suggests boththe merit of a value-capture financing tool for intra-metropolitantransportation projects and attention to the effects of intra-metropolitan transport infrastructure on location choices andurban development patterns.

The institutional and public finance structures of these twosystems – the inter- and intra-metropolitan – should differ. Thenational system (the inter-metropolitan) should be built, operated,and maintained either by or under the direction of a nationalauthority with an ability to make final decisions on routes andproject selection. Broad parts of the inter-metropolitan systemwillbe constant-returns-to-scale, so that after construction costs arepaid average-cost pricing will work well, and even the construc-tion costs can be paid with relatively simple user fees such as fueltaxes, although ideally fuel taxes that are pegged to the use of thesystem (i.e. pegged to miles driven, road wear, and environmentalexternalities).

The intra-metropolitan systems should be governed at ametropolitan scale. Metropolitan transport institutions shouldhave the authority to balance modes, link to land use, price the

system, and adjust plans and infrastructure to fit local tastes andcontexts and stages of urban development. This will inherently bea messier, more multi-modal process than what will occur on theinter-metropolitan system. Officials should encourage andempower metropolitan-scale governance in user pricing (whichwithin urban areas will include congestion pricing and marginalcost pricing of other externalities), land value-capture tax finan-cing, and integrated land use plans and transport infrastructure.This implies that the governance structures at the metropolitanlevel should have sufficient tax, pricing, and planning authority tomeet those objectives.

Delineating the inter- and intra-metropolitan systems withincities poses difficulties. The routes that carry traffic between citiescan and do carry traffic within cities. Schwartz (1976, pp. 416, 435,446, and 472–474) discusses the divergent views of urban high-ways in the debates leading to the 1956 Interstate Highway Act.Officials weighed and advocated for or against options thatincluded bypasses and spurs which would maintain the inter-metropolitan character of the system, largely routing trafficaround rather than through cities. The system, as authorized andbuilt, instead included connections into downtowns and innerrings around downtown areas in the largest cities, and the scale ofbuilding (e.g. the number of lanes) was large enough to imply that,even in 1956, an important role for the Interstate System was toaccommodate intra-urban traffic. Arguments for the InterstateSystem typically saw the modern highways as tools that wouldre-invigorate downtown economies (DiMento, 2009, pp. 145–148;Schwartz, 1976, pp. 489–491).

In most cases it would be impracticable to have two systems,excluding or diverting intra-metropolitan traffic from the inter-metropolitan system, and vice versa. The same infrastructure, withincities, serves both purposes. The difficulty with the 1956 Act and itsinitial implementation was that the impacts (and particularly thepotential negative impacts) of highways within urban areas werenot anticipated, and the planning framework to address those urbanissues was subsumed to an inter-metropolitan vision. What devel-oping countries can and should do is to engage in ground transpor-tation planning that is cognizant of the two rather distinct ifinextricably linked inter- and intra-metropolitan roles of highways.

The inter- and intra-metropolitan elements of the systemshould be coordinated, and that coordination will require constantcollaboration between national and metropolitan authorities.That collaboration should not imply a dominance of one systemover the other, but rather the linking together of the two transportsystems. An important lesson from the U.S. experience is that thetask of building a national system should not override intra-metropolitan transportation imperatives. The development of theU.S. Interstate Highway System essentially took transportationplanning away from the nation's cities, and during the construc-tion of the Interstate Highways the planning for the metropolitanportion of the network was too distant from cities and toocentralized at the national level. A truly national system wouldrequire a balance between the national routes and the need toincorporate those inter-metropolitan lines into integrated metro-politan transportation plans. Lines of authority and tax instru-ments should be delineated, possibly in proportion to the fractionof inter- and intra-metropolitan traffic that will flow on specificlinks within the urban areas. This will likely require both modelingand collaboration between national and metropolitan authorities.The U.S. is still working to build the metropolitan institutions thatwere absent in the great national planning and construction effortof the 1950s and 1960s, and other nations would be well advisedto bolster both national and metropolitan institutions at an earlystage. The U.S. experience, in which metropolitan institutionbuilding lagged after the construction of an inter-metropolitanhighway system, might be even more problematic in developing

M.G. Boarnet / Transport Policy 31 (2014) 73–8280

countries that are in some cases experiencing urban growth ratesthat dwarf anything experienced in the developed world (see, e.g.,Angel (2012), for a discussion of urbanization in the developingworld). In such contexts, strengthening metropolitan institutionsand possibly even building the urban highway system first may, insome cases, be a higher or at least co-equal priority compared withbuilding the inter-metropolitan parts of the network.

4.4. The choice of tax instruments determines policy goals

In the U.S. experience, the choice of a user fee (gasoline tax)financing instrument bolstered the voices of those who arguedthat the new highways should be judged by their impact on traffic.If drivers were paying the costs of highway construction, road userbenefits should be the only (or at least the primary) metric forjudging highway benefits (Rose, 1990, pp. 6–9 and 27–28). Thisview has a long academic tradition, also. Classic works in trans-portation economics argue that road user benefits should be theonly tool to evaluate highways, and that including other ‘non-user’benefits will double count the societal benefits of the roads(Wheaton, 1977; Mohring and Harwitz, 1962). Yet the question isnot only a matter of analytics, but of policy choices, and a lessonfrom the U.S. experience is that the choice of financing instrumentis bound up with and influences policy goals.

In urban areas, planners in the U.S. argued that highwayswould have impacts on neighborhoods, the central city businessdistrict, and urban growth patterns (see, e.g., the discussion of anurban planner's response to the Intercity Freeway in St. Paul,Minnesota, in Altshuler (1965, pp. 4–48)). Deciding whether thoseimpacts would be positive or negative involved (and still involves)some normative debate. Yet the choice of user fee finance divertedattention and debate from any land use impacts, as those whofocused on the inter-metropolitan network argued that if motor-ists were paying, impacts on motorists were the only appropriateconsiderations for policy analysis and debate (see, e.g., Rose, 1990,pp. 6–9 and 27–28; Altshuler, 1965, Chapter I; Taylor, 2000).The choice of user fee finance exacerbated the tendency to overlookthe intra-metropolitan characteristics of the system. Financinginstruments are not independent of policy goals, and in this casethe choice of financing instruments reduced the attention given togoals and impacts that were unique to the urban transportationsystem.

4.5. Plan for the post-construction period now

Institutional development should extend beyond the initialhighway construction phase. Because the U.S. pursued a largelyinter-metropolitan vision of highway planning, the nation was illprepared for the challenges of urban transportation. The highwaysthat worked well as a national system also severed urban neigh-borhoods, contributed to central city decay, and were unable torespond well to the needs of the major urban areas in a multi-modal context where congestion and externality management arekeys. While the national institutions in the U.S. were well devel-oped, due to the legacy of the BPR, metropolitan institutions hadbeen overlooked and were an afterthought. Environmental insti-tutions grew up rapidly in the post-Interstate era, but articulatingthe links between environmental institutions, metropolitan plan-ning organizations, and the existing highway institutions is acontinuing process and an ongoing challenge.

In the U.S., metropolitan planning organizations and thepractice of transportation planning are now working to catch upto the more explicitly intra-metropolitan context of the modernsystem. This includes aggressive but still evolving efforts todevelop data and methods to assess land use impacts and to tietransportation finance and planning to urban growth patterns,

land use, and metropolitan economic development. The U.S. wouldhave benefited from earlier attention to the needs of metropolitanareas and to the needs of a post-construction period characterizedby a balance between modes and attention to land use, quality oflife, and environmental issues.

5. Conclusion

The U.S. Interstate Highway experience is often held up as anexample for other countries, but rarely does that example includea detailed analysis of the history of the institutions, politics,planning, and financing choices that were bound up with highwaydevelopment in the U.S. Examining that history gives severalinsights. Building a national system requires national leadership,ideally led by a professionalized agency partly shielded from directelectoral politics, with the standing to plan national routes basedon analytic criteria but also in ways that obtain input from a broadrange of stakeholders, not simply those with political influence oraccess. In a federal system, the incentives of states vis a vis thenational government is important. In the U.S., the BPR hadauthority to choose routes and the 1956 Act limited the size ofthe Interstate Highway network while providing a large federalfunding share. The net effect was strong incentive for states tocooperate in the national road building effort while providinglimited criteria for states to game the system to obtain additionalhighway miles given the fixed extent of the network and federalleadership in the planning and route selection function. Yet thatnational leadership overlooked the crucial distinction between aninter-metropolitan and an intra-metropolitan system, and theimpact of highways on cities was brushed aside, leaving the U.S.to engage in a decades-long process of revitalizing an urbantransportation tradition that was largely usurped by the nationalnature of the 1956 Act. More broadly, the U.S. established a set ofinstitutions and financing instruments that worked well for high-way construction, but that were in many ways ill suited to thechallenges of a post-construction era. Developing nations can takeadvantage of the U.S. experience by promoting national highwaybuilding in ways that envision and plan for the post-constructionera from an early date.

Acknowledgments

An early version of this work was supported by the World Bank,South Asia Region Transport Group, under the supervision ofBinyam Reja. I am grateful for helpful comments from BinyamReja, Somik Lall, and two anonymous referees. The findings,interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this work areentirely those of the author and should not be attributed in anymanner to the World Bank, its Board of Executive Directors, or thegovernments they represent.

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