I heard about railway workers but haven’t really heard about highway construction…
For example in my country there is a story that workers were working on making a tunnel for highway through a mountain, but the rocks were harder than they expected, So they couldn’t advance at all after all days work. Workers cried.
Are there any interesting historical anecdotes related to highway construction in the US?
Thanks in advance.
7 comments
Watch this from about 47:00
https://youtu.be/Gr5iF8Zdobc
——
Meet the villain Robert Moses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker
Also look up The Big Dig in Boston. The Vine Expressway in Philly and the community pushback from Chinatown. The highway to nowhere in Baltimore. 20th century transportation planning is riddled with stories.
How about an anecdote that led to the entire interstate system? When Eisenhower was in his 20s (1919) he went on a convoy from Washington DC to California. His experience with the roads pre-Interstate were so bad that it inspired his creation of the Interstate System when he became president
One fun ~~fact~~ (edit: myth): a certain percentage of our federal interstate highway system is required to be straight, and flat. Iirc, it’s something like one out of every five contiguous miles where possible.
Why? Emergency airplane runways.
Edit: I’ve been lied to all my life. This is a myth.
https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/mayjune-2000/one-mile-five-debunking-myth
Indianapolis has two highways that run through the center of town, I-65 and I-70. These two interstates converge into this spaghetti bowl section [here](https://goo.gl/maps/3gybuRNqeD7dDLqA9).
But there are several ghost ramps of a third interstate that was never built. [I-69 was initially supposed to go through town as well](https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/transportation/2020/12/02/indianapolis-traffic-why-69-never-connected-downtown-465/5482273002/). But by the time I-69 extension was seriously under consideration, funding from the feds was starting to dry up and resistance to interstates started to gain momentum.
Now that spaghetti bowl loop section is currently under re-construction and those ghost ramps, for an interstate that was never built, will soon vanish.
To build a tunnel in Boston they chemically froze the soil to make the project easier.
[kurumi](http://kurumi.com/)
Fascinating stuff. Focuses on CT but is broadly applicable to highway building