They are taking away our open highways

[sofa king]

35. Oh, this is definitely America!

Chances are, if you live east of the Mississippi River, there is a major thoroughfare going near you that has the following name:

__(City it heads to)__ (Turn)Pike__

And that road, 150 years ago, was the most important road in your area, and it was a toll road. Almost every major and regularly maintained road was a privately owned toll road. A "turnpike" was the revolving gate apparatus that toll-payers went through to get on the highway. We still call them "turnstyles" when individual people use them.

I know that Virginia tried to place the burden of local road maintenance on the local population, as mother England had tried to do for about 500 years of history in which travel was a nightmare.

That never worked; one reason being that cart and wagon maintainers had an interest in repairing damage caused by bad roads; another being that local commerce always knew a quicker, easier, cheaper back way to market and had an interest in keeping outsiders from showing up first.

"Whichever way you choose to go," cautioned Robert E. Lee to a visitor to Lexington, "you will soon wish you had taken the other way."

The partial solution to the crisis of bad local roads was to gather investors together and build a turnpike. Turnpikes were disasters of their own--virtually everyone who struggled down one asked themselves for what, exactly, they were paying, while investors always wondered why, since they had a captive market, they couldn't double the fees, pay the road off and make a profit. (This situation still exists in Virginia with the privately owned "rich fuckers' road" that bypasses Loudoun County's traffic and goes straight to the airport.)

The near disastrous state of roads in America persisted all the way into the 20th Century. Long before he became SACEUR and eventually President, in 1919, Dwight Eisenhower was tasked to help lead a truck caravan across the United States from Washington to San Francisco. It took 23 days!

The personal experience of that one fellow seems to have changed the United States dramatically, as it was Eisenhower who promoted and found the funding for the national highway project that made the United States so much smaller and less insular.

So were it not for Ike, America would probably still be a spaghetti network of crumbling roads and tourist trap turnpikes designed to drain travelers of their money.

Those of you from New Jersey probably would not notice the difference.