Highway History Bibliography

Interstate System, critical

The latest additions are in bold

Gottfreund, Owen D., 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape, Oxford University Press, 2004. (Takes an historical approach to argue that the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 "undercharged motorists by a wide margin, penalizing the nonmotoring majority while simultaneously inducing more and more Americans to adopt the automobile as the preferred mode of transport" and "consistently favored construction in unpopulated areas while impeding investments in urban transportation networks." He illustrates these themes with chapters on Denver, Colorado; Middlebury, Vermont; and Smyrna, Tennessee.)

Leavitt, Helen, Superhighway-Superhoax, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1970. (A dust jacket blurb conveyed the theme: "From Sea to Shining Sea: we are strangling in a concrete straitjacket that pollutes the environment and makes driving a nightmare." The classic early 1970's diatribe on the subject.)

Kelley, Ben, The Pavers and the Paved, Donald W. Brown, Inc., 1971.

Mowbray, A. Q., Road to Ruin, J. B. Lippincott Company, 1969.