ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, June 29, 1996 TAG: 9607010052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
TODAY, THE INTERSTATE SYSTEM is 99.93 percent complete and contains 42,794 miles of roads nationwide.
Conceived as a system of roads to make military movements easier for national defense, it became not only the greatest public works project in U.S. history but, some say, bigger on a historical scale than the Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China.
It's the Interstate highway system, and today marks its 40th birthday.
On June 29, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed congressional legislation authorizing a 41,000 mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and, more importantly, creating a trust fund, financed with gasoline and diesel fuel taxes, to pay for building it.
It was the beginning of an exciting time for those in charge of Virginia's highways.
Henry Howard, a retired construction engineer with the Virginia Department of Transportation's Salem District, was working as a resident engineer in Tidewater at the time and recalled that the state highway commissioner sent down word not to let any of the new federal funds go to waste. "Everybody was scrambling around to get [projects] under way," Howard said.
The history of the Interstate system goes back, perhaps, as far as 1922 when General John "Black Jack" Pershing sent the Secretary of War a map identifying 56,000 miles of roads that were important to national defense. Later, in 1944 at the height of World War II, Congress authorized the designation of an interstate highway system linking major cities and industrial centers but failed to provide any construction money.
In the early 1940s, Virginia built its first limited-access four-lane road, the Shirley Highway, from Woodbridge in Northern Virginia to the Pentagon, Howard said. That road is now part of I-95.
Today, the Interstate system is 99.93 percent complete and contains 42,794 miles of roads nationwide, according to the Federal Highway Administration. It carries 510 billion vehicle-miles of traffic each year, accounting for more than 22 percent of all U.S. highway travel.
The system has 15,000 interchanges, 54,726 bridges and when the final 73 miles are completed will have cost $130 billion to build.
The first contract for an Interstate project was awarded in Missouri in August of 1956. In the Roanoke area, the first section of Interstate roadway was a 4.9-mile section of I-81 in Botetourt County finished in December 1960. A six-lane section of I-81 between Wytheville and Fort Chiswell completed the road's 328-mile path through Virginia when it was opened to traffic in 1987.
The way I-81 connects the people of the Shenandoah Valley and Southwest Virginia and its influence on the region's economy was recognized by leaders of the region when they formed the I-81 Corridor Council in 1989.
In a survey conducted by the council of 1,000 business, civic and government leaders along I-81's path, 92 percent of those responding said access to the Interstate is a major strength for their communities, said Wayne Strickland, executive director of the Fifth Planning District Commission and chairman of the corridor council.
Tom Johnson, a Virginia Tech economist, noted that economic activity generated by Interstate highways tends to concentrate near highway interchanges. Some businesses, he said, refuse to operate in areas that are not within a certain driving distance of an Interstate highway interchange.
On the downside, though, Johnson said that research conducted at West Virginia University has shown that some smaller communities have been hurt by Interstates because the roads make it easier for people to drive elsewhere to trade.
As the Interstate system turns 40, many critics are saying that the federal government is not doing enough to deal with the aging of highways and bridges. Groups ranging from insurance companies to highway contractors to hotels and other tourist-dependent business have criticized Congress' use of highway trust fund money for things other than maintaining the interstate system.
"Thirty-five percent of highway and one-quarter of the bridges on the Interstate are in need of repair or upgrading," says Frank Turner, chairman of a commission named by Eisenhower whose report led to the 1956 legislation.
"If we are to continue to reap [the interstate system's] economic benefits and if it is to continue to provide essential freedom of mobility and maximum safety for our citizens, we must provide adequate funding in the years ahead," Turner said.
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: chart and map - Interstate Facts. STAFF KEYWORDS: MGRby CNB