What the Interstate Highway System Should Have Looked Like

This anecdote has been told at Cities before but it bears repeating: Eisenhower himself didn't realize the Interstate Highway System would cut through American cities until a few years after construction began. Ike had wanted a national road network like the one he'd seen in Germany during World War II. But he'd also wanted these roads to stop at the doorsteps of cities, not push right past.

That story comes to mind reading a recent paper from University of Southern California scholar Marlon Boarnet in this month's Transport Policy. Boarnet outlines a series of lessons that developing countries might learn from America's great road expansion experiment. By far the most compelling is his suggestion that the Interstate Highway System should have been two distinct systems: one running between cities, and another running within them.