The Interstate Highway System is the national network of limited-access expressways that the United States began building in 1956 under the Federal-Aid Highway Act. Now more than 46,000 miles long and paid for largely by federal fuel taxes, it standardized long-distance road travel, remade American cities and suburbs, and bound the country to a car-and-truck economy.
It was sold to the country as a weapon. The official name was the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and its backers promised roads wide and fast enough to rush troops to a coast or empty a city before the bombs fell. The tanks never rolled. What the system actually did was quieter and more total: it decided which places would prosper and which would empty out, pulled American life into the suburbs, and drove its concrete straight through neighborhoods whose residents were too poor to stop it.