President Dwight Eisenhower signed the law creating the system and the Highway Trust Fund to finance it in 1956.
So when the Transportation Research Board held its 85th annual meeting in Washington, D.C., recently, a panel of academic and private sector experts took stock of the half-century gone by and gazed down the road ahead for our car-centric nation.
Like the Internet, the interstate has affected the American economy in ways its creators couldn’t and didn’t imagine. Bruce Seeley, professor of history and chair of the social sciences department at