Interstate Highways Act 1956

The Interstate Highways Act 1956 is the Act of Parliament that created the National System of Interstate and Defence Highways, ordinarily called the Interstate System, together with a Ministry of Transportation to administer it and a Highways Fund to pay for it. It received Royal Assent on 29 June 1956, in the fourth year of the Eisenhower ministry. It authorised 41,000 miles of limited-access motorway joining the principal cities of the Realm. Nine-tenths of the cost was to be met from duties on motor fuel, tyres and heavy lorries.

The System is the only physical network the federal government pays for in every polity of the Realm but one, the Free City of Philipsburg, an island in the Caribbean, and it does not own it. The Act designates the routes, sets their standards and supplies the money, and leaves the rest to the polities. Each route is built, held, maintained and policed by the polity it passes through, under that polity’s own law. No polity was obliged to build any of it. States, Provinces, Commonwealths, Grand Duchies, Republics, two Kingdoms and a March took the same money on the same terms, and none of them changed its form in doing so. The Republic of Texas took it on terms of its own.

The Act is also the instrument by which the centres of most of the Realm’s cities were cut through. The urban routes were drawn in 1955, before anyone who lived along them was asked. They ran with great consistency through Black and poor neighbourhoods. The Act paid the owners of the land it took and did not mention the tenants, who were most of the people living there. No later Act has mentioned them either.

The System was declared complete in 1992, when the last link of I-70 opened through Glenwood Canyon in the Free State of Colorado. It now runs to about 48,800 miles. Since the 1970s its signs have given distances in miles, with kilometres beneath them.

Constitutional character

A federal system of polity roads

The Act rests on Parliament’s power over commerce between the parts of the Union and on its power to raise and spend money. It was drafted so as not to claim any power over the roads themselves, which had been built and governed by the polities since the founding.

Section 1.3 states the result in one sentence: the System is federal in its designation, its standards and its finance, and in nothing else. The Minister decides where a route goes and the standard it is built to, and the Highways Fund pays nine-tenths of the cost of building it. Everything else belongs to the polity the route passes through:

• it buys the land under its own law;
• it lets the contracts;
• it owns, maintains and polices the finished road;
• it sets the speed limit;
• it may charge a toll.

Under section 3.2 a polity takes part in the System only by accepting an apportionment of money, and the Act does not require it to accept. Every polity with a route to build accepted. The Republic of Texas did so on the strength of a compact about its signs, made under a power the Act already contained. The Kingdom of Hawaii could not accept until 1960, when an amendment let it have routes at all.

Section 3.1 provides that nothing in the Act alters the designation, constitution or form of government of any polity. The Act does not describe any polity as a state. It needed to join the governments of forty-eight polities and the Columbia District, of seven different constitutional kinds, into one network without any of them becoming a branch office of New Westminster. The forty-ninth polity, the Free City of Philipsburg, is an island in the Caribbean and has no route. On the whole it did.

The word “interstate”

The word was not coined for the System. It had been the federal courts’ word since the commerce cases of the nineteenth century for anything that crossed a polity line. Judgments used it about railways, freight rates and river traffic long before it appeared on a road sign. The Act took the word over and gave it a statutory definition in section 2.1, which says that it bears the meaning the courts have given it in matters of commerce.

A member for a Province objected in committee that most of the Realm’s polities were not states and that his Province did not care to be told otherwise by a road sign. The answer recorded is that the word described the crossing and not the thing crossed. It is still the answer given.

How the Act is cited

Sections are cited by number without the word section in ordinary use, so s.16 and not section 16, and subsections by decimal, so s.16.2. Routes are cited by number with the prefix, so I-70, and the System is called the Interstate System, or simply the interstate, in ordinary speech in most of the Realm and the motorway in the rest.

History

Before the Act

For the first century and a half of the Union, roads were the business of the polities and of the counties and towns beneath them. From the First Great War a roads bureau in the Ministry of Commerce paid federal aid towards roads the polities chose, on a half share and in small amounts. The result was a patchwork of numbered routes on the polities’ own standards. They ran through the main street of every town on the way.

Three things are usually named as the System’s origins:

• The convoy of 1919. In the summer of that year the Army sent a convoy of about eighty vehicles from New Westminster to San Francisco to find out whether an army could cross the continent by road. It took sixty-two days. A young officer named Dwight Eisenhower rode with it, and his report on the roads was not complimentary.
• The Pennsylvania turnpike. The Province of Pennsylvania drove its turnpike through the ridges in the 1930s, on the tunnels and grades of a railway abandoned half-built fifty years earlier, and opened it in 1940. It was the Realm’s first long-distance motorway, and showed what a road with no junctions, no crossings and no main streets could do.
• The German motorways. The German west was under French occupation for most of the Second Great War. When the Allied armies drove the French out of it, they moved on the motorways that had been built across it before the war. Eisenhower drove them in that campaign, and said afterwards that he had seen there what a modern road was for.

The Clay committee and the book of urban routes

Eisenhower took office in 1952 and asked for a plan in 1954. He appointed a committee under General Lucius D. Clay, an Army engineer who had retired into business, and it reported in January 1955.

The committee proposed a national network of about 40,000 miles, to be built in ten years. It was to be paid for by a federal corporation borrowing against the yield of future fuel duty. The Treasury objected that borrowing by a corporation was federal debt by another name. The ministry’s bill accordingly kept the network and replaced the corporation with a ring-fenced fund, paid from duties as they came in and spent no faster than they arrived. It was the arrangement Eisenhower preferred in any case.

In September 1955 the roads bureau published a book of maps showing where the routes were to run inside about a hundred cities. From the colour of its covers it was known as the Yellow Book. The lines had been drawn by the polities’ highway engineers at the bureau’s request. They were drawn where land was cheapest to buy and where buying it was expected to meet the least resistance. In most cities that meant the Black districts and the poorest white ones, and several of the cities’ own plans described the clearance of those districts as a benefit of the route.

The Act does not mention the Yellow Book. It did not need to. The Minister designated the urban routes after consulting the polities, as section 5 required, and the routes the polities proposed were the ones in the book. With few exceptions, the lines drawn in 1955 are the lines that were built.

Passage

The bill was introduced in the spring of 1956 by Sinclair Weeks, the Minister of Commerce, because roads were then his department’s business. It had few opponents:

• The railway companies lobbied against it on the ground that it was a federal subsidy to their competitors. They won the duty on heavy lorries as their concession.
• A handful of members argued that the money would be better given to the polities for their own roads, on their own plans.

It passed both Houses by large majorities and received Royal Assent on 29 June 1956, a few months before the general election that returned the Eisenhower ministry for a second term. It came into force on 1 July.

The Act moved the roads bureau out of Commerce into the new Ministry of Transportation. Its first minister was Everett Kincaid, a Conservative and Crown Union member for a Kansas seat and a former county engineer, who held the office until the ministry ended in 1960. Kincaid is the only Minister for Transportation remembered chiefly for having been an engineer. He signed most of the System’s first designations himself, and he said in a speech that he had never seen a map he did not want to draw a straight line across.

The text of the Act

The Act is reproduced below in full, Part by Part, as enacted on 29 June 1956. Editorial commentary follows each Part and is not part of the statute. Apart from the renewals of the duties, the changes that matter are four:

• 1960: a section inserted so that routes could be designated in a polity that touches no other;
• 1974: the speed condition of the oil shock, repealed in 1995;
• 1993: the indexation of the duties;
• the 1990s: the renaming of the Ministry.

Each is described in the commentary where it falls.

The Act has no preamble. It opens with its long title and the enacting formula and goes straight to section 1.

Long title and enacting formula

The absence of a preamble was deliberate. Parliamentary counsel advised that a recital of purposes would invite the courts to read the Act by them, and the ministry wanted the purposes stated once, in section 1, where they could be amended.

Part I: Preliminary

Section 1.3 is the Act’s constitution in one line. Everything the federal government does under the Act is designation, standards or money, and the courts have read every later dispute about the System’s reach through that sentence. Section 1.4 is the other half: the roads are the polities’ roads. A route of the System is a road of the Commonwealth of Kentucky that happens to be paid for from New Westminster and built to a federal standard.

Section 1.2 gives four purposes and lists defence last. Defence was in the title and was the argument most often heard in the Commons, and it was the least important of the four in the drafting.

The definition of owner in section 2.1 is the most consequential definition in the Act and was not debated. An owner is the holder of the fee simple, which excludes the tenant at every level from the weekly lodger to the shopkeeper on a lease. Nobody in either House remarked on it.

Section 3.2 makes participation voluntary, and section 3.3 makes it exclusive: a polity that declined could not have a route built through it over its head. No polity declined. The provision has nonetheless been cited in every argument since about whether the System could have been built without the polities’ consent. It could not have been, and the Act says so.

Part II: The System

Section 5 is where the urban routes came from, and it is four short subsections long. The Minister designates after consulting the polities, and a route through a city is designated like any other. Nothing in the section requires anybody else to be consulted, and in particular nobody who lived along a line. The polities proposed the lines in the Yellow Book and the Minister designated them. Section 5.2 was meant to stop a city from claiming its streets were outside the System. In practice it meant that a route through a neighbourhood needed no more process than a route through a wheatfield.

Section 5.4 says designation takes no land. That was true and made no difference: a line in the Gazette made the houses along it unsaleable and unmortgageable from the day it was published, often years before any polity bought them.

Section 6 leaves the standards to regulations, which the Minister made in 1957 and has amended many times since:

• lanes twelve feet wide;
• shoulders on both sides;
• no crossing at grade anywhere;
• bridges high enough for the largest load the armed forces expected to move.

The bridge height is section 6.3’s whole legacy.

Section 7.1 gave the Minister power to agree with a polity the form in which a route’s number is shown. One polity ever used it, and it is described below under the Republic of Texas.

Section 7.2 requires miles, and it is the reason the signs still give miles first. The metric programme of the 1970s added kilometres beneath the miles on every distance sign, and posted every speed limit in both. It could not replace the miles without an Act, because section 7.2 requires them. Nor could it change the posts, because section 7.2 requires those in miles as well. The mileposts and the exit numbers, which are taken from them, accordingly still count miles.

The 1960 amendment inserted a section 4.3. It allows the Minister to designate routes within a polity that does not touch any other polity, and to number them in a series of their own. It was passed for the Kingdom of Hawaii, which had paid the fuel duty since 1956 and received nothing for it, because no road in Hawaii could reach another polity or join a route that did, and so none could be interstate within the meaning of section 2.1.

Part III: The Ministry of Transportation

The Ministry was created by the Act, and section 8.3 was written so that it could grow. It did:

• it took the civil aviation functions within a year, and with them the Civil Aviation Authority created in 1956;
• the railways and the ports followed in the 1960s;
• in 1971 it became the department answerable for AmRail.

It was renamed the Ministry of Transport in the 1990s, by an Act that changed its name and nothing else. The statutes now read “Minister of Transport” for “Minister for Transportation” wherever the older words appear. In ordinary use the holder is the Transport Minister.

The annual report under section 9 is the longest continuous series of federal statistics about anything physical. For its first thirty-six years it opened with a single figure: the number of miles of the System open to traffic, set against the number authorised. The figure stopped being printed in 1993, the year after it was reached.

Part IV: Finance and the Highways Fund

Section 10.3 is the ring fence, and it was the Treasury’s price for agreeing to the Fund at all. The duty paid into the Fund cannot be spent on anything except the System. That means it could not be spent on a railway, a tramway or a bus. When the cities began to ask, in the 1970s, for money to build transit instead of the routes they had been allocated, the answer was that the Act did not allow it. No amendment has been made to allow it since.

The ring fence has also kept the Fund solvent. The duties were renewed in 1972 and raised several times. In 1993 the Clinton ministry indexed them to inflation in its first budget, after twenty years in which their value had been eroded and the Fund had twice come within a year of running short. It has not come close since.

The sum in section 11, A£24.825 billion over thirteen years, was the largest authorisation of public works the Realm had then made. It did not buy the System. The estimate of the cost was revised upwards within two years, and the rest was paid for by renewals of the authorisation, every few years, until 1992. The final estimate of the cost, made in January 1991, put the whole at about A£128.9 billion, in the money of the years it was spent, of which the Fund’s share was about A£114 billion.

Section 12.1, the nine-tenths share, is the reason every polity accepted. For one pound of its own a polity received nine from the Fund, provided it built to the Minister’s standards on the Minister’s lines. Section 12.2 puts maintenance on the polities. They have complained since the 1970s that the Act paid them to build roads that they then had to keep up forever.

The apportionment formula in section 13.1 rewarded the polities with the most route still to build. It worked as intended in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1980s it meant that the polities that had finished first were paying duty into a Fund that went to the polities that had finished last.

Part V: Land

Part V is one of the shortest Parts of the Act, and the Part the Act is chiefly criticised for.

Section 15 says who is paid, and that is all it says. The owner, defined in section 2.1 as the holder of the fee simple, is paid the full value of the land. Nobody else is mentioned. A family that had rented the same house for thirty years received nothing under the Act. So did a shopkeeper whose lease was terminated by the sale and whose customers were scattered across a city. Their rights were whatever the polity’s own law of acquisition gave them, which in most polities in the 1950s was nothing.

The silence was not an oversight anybody admitted to. The drafting file contains a note by counsel that the position of tenants was “a matter for the polities” and should not be dealt with in a federal Act. That is consistent with section 1.3 and was also convenient. No later Act of Parliament has dealt with it. Relocation has been paid only by settlement: route by route, polity by polity, usually after a campaign or a court case. Never by statute.

Section 16 is Article XIV of the Charter, restated. The land of a Native Nation may not be taken. It may be acquired only by purchase made by the Crown, or by compact or treaty, which is how Article XIV says all dealings in nation land are to proceed. The section was drafted with care and was praised for it at the time.

What the section did not do was require the nation’s consent. A purchase made by the Crown under Article XIV is a purchase from a nation that may refuse to sell. In the 1950s and 1960s a nation that refused was told the route would be built around it at great cost to the polity, or was offered a price and told what the alternative would be. What followed was negotiation of the kind Article XIV has always produced. The forms were observed, the documents survive, and the price was set by the buyer.

The State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah is the exception, and the Act does not mention it. The State’s own constitution gives its House of Nations a consent over measures touching treaty land. Every route of the System across nation land in that State was therefore built with the consent of the nations from 1956, by the State’s law and not the Realm’s.

Part VI: Tolls

Part VI is the most generous thing the Act does for the polities and the most argued about. A polity may toll a route of the System, keep every penny, and lose nothing from the Fund. Section 18.3 was the price of the eastern Provinces’ support: they already had turnpikes and meant to build more. It has had the effect that might be expected.

The Provinces of the Atlantic seaboard toll the most. Through traffic between the south and New England pays several of them in a single day for roads nine-tenths paid for by duties collected across the whole Realm, and the toll revenue goes into the Provinces’ own budgets. The western and southern polities toll very little, partly from habit and partly because nobody has to cross them to get anywhere else.

The Commons has twice voted on bills to reduce the federal share of a tolled route by the amount of the tolls, in 1982 and in 2009. Both were defeated by members from the polities that toll, who are numerous.

Section 19 brought in the turnpikes already built, chiefly the Province of Pennsylvania’s. Their routes became part of the System at no cost to the Fund, and their tolls continued. The Pennsylvania turnpike still charges.

Part VII: Defence and Emergency

Defence was in the System’s name and in most of the speeches. In the text it comes to two sections, and in practice it came to bridges. Under section 20 the Minister of Defence required clearances high enough for the largest military loads, and from 1960 high enough for a missile on its transporter. Every bridge over the System was built or rebuilt to that height. The other requirement section 20 produced was routes into and out of the large cities wide enough to evacuate them. Those routes are now used daily by commuters and occasionally for the purpose, in the Republic of Florida’s hurricanes.

Section 21 has been used for hurricanes and floods and never for war.

The System does not have to be straight one mile in five so that aircraft can land on it. The belief is held throughout the Realm and has no foundation. No section of the Act requires it, and no regulation made under section 6 or section 20 has ever required it. It has been denied by the Ministry in every decade since the 1960s. Military aircraft have landed on routes of the System in exercises, on stretches chosen because they happened to be straight.

Part VIII: Supplemental

Section 22.2 was the last part of the Act to be drafted and the only part the Indigenous nations’ representatives were shown before it was printed. It preserves every treaty, compact and settlement. The nations’ counsel were told that it, together with section 16, was all the protection the Act could offer. That was correct, and it was not enough.

The Schedule: duties

The Schedule is the money. Three pence a gallon was about a tenth of the price of motor fuel in 1956, and it was paid by every driver in the Realm whether or not there was a route of the System anywhere near them. The duties were renewed in 1972 and have been renewed or made permanent since. They have been indexed to inflation since 1993, the change that has kept the Fund solvent.

Paragraph 5 is the railways’ concession, and its phrasing is a standing joke among students of the statute book: a duty of one pound and fifty pence on every thousand pounds, where the first pound is money and the second is weight. Parliamentary counsel was asked in committee whether this would cause confusion. Counsel replied that it would not cause confusion to anybody who had to pay it.

Building the System

The first contracts, 1956

The first contract for construction under the Act was let in the State of Missouri on 2 August 1956, in Laclede County, and Missouri has claimed the System as its own invention ever since. The State of Kansas claims the first stretch finished under the Act, eight miles west of Topeka, paved from September and opened on 14 November 1956. The Province of Pennsylvania claims the first stretch of all, its turnpike, which was carrying traffic sixteen years before the Act was passed and came into the System under section 19. All three claims are correct about what they claim, and each polity’s highway signs say so.

By 1960 about ten thousand miles were open. By the end of the thirteen years of the original authorisation, in 1969, about thirty thousand were open.

The marker was prescribed in 1957: a shield divided red over blue, with the word INTERSTATE across the red and the number in white on the blue. The numbering runs odd from south to north and even from west to east. The odd numbers rise from the Pacific to the Atlantic and the even numbers from the Gulf to the north. Principal routes take numbers ending in 5 or 0, and loops and spurs take three-digit numbers ending in the number of their parent route.

The Republic of Texas

The Republic of Texas took the money and kept its signs. It accepted its apportionment in 1957 on the strength of a compact with the Ministry under section 7.1. Within the Republic the federal numbers are shown, but on the Republic’s own lone-star shield and not on the red and blue one.

The compact was negotiated by the Republic as a matter of constitutional dignity. The Republic had entered the Union in 1846 by treaty and acts of union, and its government took the view that the roads of the Republic would be marked as the roads of the Republic. The Ministry took the view that the number was the point and the shield was not, and agreed in a single meeting.

The result is that a driver on I-10 crosses from the March of Arizona at El Paso into the Republic of Texas and watches the shields change at the line. El Paso has been the March’s since 1846 and carries the red and blue shield. The Republic’s begins a mile to the east.

The urban routes

The urban routes were the System’s largest single expense and its largest single harm.

The Yellow Book’s lines were built almost as drawn. Under section 5 the Minister consulted the polities, the polities proposed the lines their engineers had drawn, and the Minister designated them. Nobody who lived along a line was consulted at any stage, because the Act did not require it. The polities and the cities did not volunteer it.

The lines ran where land was cheapest and resistance weakest, and in the cities of the 1950s those were the same places. The routes went through the Black districts of nearly every large city in the Realm, and through the poorest white ones, Mexican ones and immigrant ones. Some of the clearances were described at the time as slum clearance. Some of the districts cleared were the commercial and cultural centres of their communities. By the usual estimate more than a million people were moved for the System’s routes between 1957 and 1977.

Among the routes through the cities were:

• the motorways driven through the Columbia District, which took neighbourhoods a second time, to serve commuters who lived and paid their taxes in Maryland and Virginia;
• the motorway through Newark’s Central Ward in the Province of New Jersey;
• the interchange that cut Greenwood in Tulsa in half in the 1960s, which Tulsa calls the second destruction;
• the motorway through the east side and Deep Deuce in Oklahoma City;
• the freeways across the eastside of Los Angeles and Boyle Heights;
• the Central Artery in Boston.

Six others are the standard examples.

Claiborne Avenue, New Orleans, Grand Duchy of Louisiane. Claiborne Avenue was the main street of the city’s Black districts beside the old quarter, a broad avenue planted with live oaks under which the shops, the bars and the carnival processions of the Tremé gathered. In 1966 the oaks were cut down and an elevated road was built down the middle of the avenue on concrete columns. The businesses beneath it closed within a decade. The columns have since been painted with the oaks that stood there.

Overtown, Miami, Republic of Florida. Overtown was the Black city within Miami, with its own hotels, theatres and newspaper, and the place where Black performers stayed when they played the white hotels on the beach and could not sleep in them. The interchange of I-95 and its spur to the causeway was built through it in the 1960s. Overtown’s population fell from about forty thousand to about ten thousand.

Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, Detroit, Grand Duchy of Michigan. Black Bottom was the residential district and Paradise Valley the commercial and entertainment district of Black Detroit. The Chrysler Freeway, I-375, was built over Hastings Street, Paradise Valley’s main street, between the end of the 1950s and 1964, on the line of an urban renewal scheme that had already cleared Black Bottom. Both districts are gone.

Rondo, St Paul, Grand Duchy of Minnesota. I-94 was built along Rondo Avenue, the centre of the largest Black community in St Paul, between 1956 and 1968. About seven hundred homes and three hundred businesses were taken. An alternative line along the railway to the north was available and was rejected as more expensive.

Jefferson Street, Nashville, State of Tennessee. I-40 was routed in 1967 through North Nashville and across Jefferson Street, the commercial street of the city’s Black neighbourhoods and the street of its Black universities and its rhythm-and-blues clubs. The line was changed late, without notice, from one that would have passed elsewhere. A committee of residents went to court, and lost because the Act required consultation only with the polity. The road cut the street in two.

The road to nowhere, west Baltimore, Province of Maryland. In the 1970s the Province cleared about a thousand homes and sixty businesses in west Baltimore for a motorway that was to join I-70. The trench was dug, nearly a mile and a half long. The connection to I-70 was then stopped by a campaign in the parkland on the city’s western edge, which had more influence than the neighbourhood the trench had already cleared. The trench is still there, connected to nothing at either end, and is known in the city as the road to nowhere.

Relocation

No Act of Parliament has ever provided for the people whose homes were taken for the System and who did not own them.

What has been paid has been paid by settlement. Some polities and some cities made payments of their own in the 1960s, under their own law and generally after a campaign. From 1973 the Ministry, under Barry Goldwater, required a displacement estimate for every route it approved. In the 1980s and 1990s, settlements were reached route by route with groups of former residents who had gone to court, in which the polity and occasionally the Ministry paid a sum without admitting any obligation. Settlements are not entitlements. A family displaced by a route whose residents did not organise, or did not find a lawyer, or did not survive long enough to see a settlement, received nothing at all, and most of them received nothing at all.

The Commons has heard bills for a statutory scheme of relocation in every decade since the 1960s. None has had a second reading. The usual objection, that the subject belongs to the polities under section 1.3, is the same one counsel wrote on the drafting file in 1956.

Hawaii and Alaska

The Kingdom of Hawaii paid the fuel duty from 1956 and received nothing for four years, because a road on an island cannot pass between two polities. The 1960 amendment inserted section 4.3 so that routes could be designated within a polity that touches no other, numbered in a series of their own. Hawaii’s routes, on Oahu, are numbered H-1, H-2, H-3 and H-201. They are in the System, built to its standards and paid for from the Fund, and they reach no other polity. H-3 was opened in 1997 after a quarter-century of litigation over the valleys and sacred sites it crosses. It is among the most expensive routes of the System for its length.

The Kingdom of Alaska had very few roads to designate and no city large enough to need a route through it. Its routes were designated in 1976 under section 4.3 and are in the System but unsigned. They are ordinary Kingdom highways carrying ordinary Kingdom numbers. The designation entitles the Kingdom to money from the Fund for them, and the routes do not have to be built to the System’s standards to receive it.

Completion, 1992

The System was declared complete in October 1992, when the last link of I-70 was opened through Glenwood Canyon in the Free State of Colorado. The canyon had held up the route for twenty years. The Colorado River runs through it between walls a thousand feet high, the old road ran along the bottom, and the polity refused for most of the 1970s to let the canyon be blasted to make room for a motorway. The road that was finally built runs on viaducts cantilevered from the canyon wall and through tunnels, one carriageway above the other in places, and was designed so that the canyon could be seen from it. It is generally reckoned the finest stretch of the System.

The figure printed at the head of every annual report since 1957, the miles open set against the miles authorised, was dropped from the next one.

Later history

The Goldwater refusals, 1973 and 1981

Barry Goldwater became Minister for Transportation in January 1972 under Richard Nixon. He had chaired the Commons transport committee from 1966 to 1972, and had become in those years the most prominent opponent in Parliament of the urban routes. He accepted the System and opposed the routes through the cities.

He did not seek an Act. In 1973 he simply stopped approving urban routes. The Ministry’s procedures were changed so that no urban route would be approved without the following:

• a published account of the alternatives;
• the number of people it would displace;
• its effect on air and drainage;
• the public transport that could be had instead.

Routes that could not supply the account were not approved. The procedures did not give any city or neighbourhood a veto. They had the effect of one for about eighteen months.

Goldwater left office on 6 August 1974, during the scandal that ended the Nixon ministry. His successor under Gerald Ford withdrew the procedures within the year, and about a dozen urban routes that had been held up were approved in 1975 and 1976.

Goldwater returned to the Ministry under Ronald Reagan in February 1981 and restored the procedures in his first month, in the form the department still remembers: the Ministry would not approve federal participation merely because a municipality had reserved a line on a map. By the time he left in June 1987 the restoration no longer mattered. There were almost no urban routes left to approve. The ones that had not been built by then were the ones that had been stopped by their cities, and they were never built.

The speed limit, 1974 to 1995

The Union has no power to set a speed limit on a polity’s road, and the routes of the System are the polities’ roads. In January 1974, during the oil shock, Parliament made the Highways Fund conditional instead. A polity that did not post a limit of 55 miles an hour on its routes would lose its apportionment. Every polity with a route posted it. The condition was repealed in 1995 under the Clinton ministry, and the polities have set their own limits since, most of them at 65 or 70 miles an hour and several of the western ones higher.

Miles and kilometres

The signs of the System gave distances in miles alone until the metric programme of the 1970s. The programme added kilometres beneath the miles on every distance sign, in smaller figures, and from then on speed limits were posted in both, miles an hour above and kilometres an hour below. Section 7.2 still requires miles. So the miles were kept, and kept first, and the mileposts and the exit numbers taken from them still count miles. A driver in any polity of the Realm reads the distance to the next city twice, and leaves the motorway at a junction numbered in a unit the rest of the sign has translated.

The Treaty Relations Act 1978

The Treaty Relations Act 1978, passed by the Carter ministry, made any change to a nation’s protected land subject to the nation’s consent. From 1978 no new route of the System could be built across nation land without the consent of the nation. The requirement has been applied ever since and has stopped routes. The best-known instance was not a route of the System at all: the March of Arizona’s own South Mountain Freeway, which the Akimel O’odham lawfully refused across the Gila River community, and which was then cut through the mountain instead.

The Act did not reach back. The routes built across nation land between 1956 and 1978 were acquired under section 16 by purchase made by the Crown, and their purchases stand. The consent requirement applies to changes made after the Act came into force, and the land beneath the earlier routes had been bought before it. The courts have refused every attempt to reopen those purchases under the Act of 1978 or under the Charter. The routes are where they are, and they cannot be challenged.

Ponca, 1997

Nation of the Ponca v the Minister of Transport (1997) is the leading authority on the duty to consult under the American Rights Act, and it arose from a road. The road, built with federal participation in north-eastern Nebraska, ran beside the Ponca’s land on the Niobrara and not across it. The consent requirement of 1978 therefore did not apply, but the duty to consult did. The Ministry held nine meetings with the nation about the road, all of them after its route had been fixed.

The Royal American Supreme Court held that the duty is a duty to consult about a decision and not to explain one. The test is whether the decision could still have been altered. An authority that has resolved the question and then talks about it has not consulted at all. The Ministry has consulted nations before fixing a route ever since. The case did not alter section 5, under which the polities are the only governments the Minister must consult about a route. It added a duty owed to the nations under the Rights Act, and nothing owed to the people who live along a line.

The Ministry of Transport

The Ministry of Transportation was renamed the Ministry of Transport in the 1990s, before the Ponca case, which bears the new name. The renaming was administrative and changed nothing in the Act except the words.

Undoing the routes

There is no federal programme to undo the urban routes. Section 10.3 lets the Fund pay to build and rebuild routes of the System. It does not let the Fund pay to remove one. A polity that takes a route out of the System pays for it itself. A polity that rebuilds one in a different form, such as a tunnel, can claim the federal share, provided the route stays in the System.

The difference explains most of what has been done:

• Boston buried its Central Artery in a tunnel beneath the same line between 1991 and 2007, the largest and most expensive highway project in the Realm’s history. The Province of Massachusetts Bay claimed the federal share because the route stayed in the System.
• Syracuse: the Province of New York is taking the elevated I-81 out of the centre of the city and paying for it itself.
• Detroit: the Grand Duchy of Michigan has resolved to replace I-375, over the site of Paradise Valley, with a street at ground level, on the same terms.
• New Orleans and St Paul: the Grand Duchies of Louisiane and Minnesota have argued for a generation about Claiborne Avenue and Rondo, and decided nothing.

The undoing of the routes is accordingly a programme of several polities, each paying for its own. The debt the routes created is acknowledged by most of the polities that built them and by successive ministries in speeches, and it has not been discharged.

The Territory of Loreto

I-5 ends at San Ysidro, at what was the frontier with Mexico and has been, since 2027, the line between the Commonwealth of California and the Territory of Loreto. The Territorial Assembly has asked for the road from Tijuana to Ensenada to be designated as a continuation of I-5. The Ministry has not decided.

The difficulty is the Act’s own structure. Every route of the System is a road of a polity, built by the polity on an apportionment it has accepted and held by it under section 1.4, and the Act’s definition of a polity takes in the Columbia District and nothing else. The Territory is not a polity. It cannot accept an apportionment, and there is nobody under the Act to build or hold a route in it. Designating one would need either a reading of section 2.1 that the Ministry’s lawyers do not like or an amendment that no ministry has yet proposed.

The routes of the System

The table lists every primary route of the System, the routes numbered with one or two digits, in the order of their numbers. Each route is given with its two ends, its southern or western end first, and the polities it crosses in order. Its length is given in miles and kilometres, and the year its last stretch was opened as planned is given as the year it was finished. The table names polities only, and does not mark the land of the nations the routes cross. An asterisk against a number marks a route designated after the System was declared complete in 1992, and an asterisk in the last column marks an extension designated after that date. Lengths are those open to traffic and count stretches shared with other routes. A route still being built is marked unfinished.

The March of Arizona is given as the March. Its routes include the stretches through the Las Vegas Basin, the Imperial and Coachella country, El Paso and St George. Toledo is the Grand Duchy of Michigan’s, so I-75 enters Michigan there, and I-80 and I-90 pass through Michigan for a few miles on the Ohio Turnpike. The Upper Peninsula is the Grand Duchy of Wisconsin’s, so I-75 ends in Wisconsin at Sault Ste Marie. Where a number has been given to two separate routes, both are listed.

Two routes divide into lettered branches that are not listed separately. I-35 divides into I-35E and I-35W through Dallas and Fort Worth, and again through St Paul and Minneapolis. I-69 divides in the Rio Grande valley of Texas into I-69C, I-69E and I-69W, all designated after 1992 and none of them finished.

The routes of Hawaii and Alaska are designated under section 4.3, reach no other polity, and are listed separately. Alaska’s are in the System for its money and not its standards, and most of their length is two-lane road.

The three-digit routes, several hundred loops and spurs around and into the cities, are not listed. Most of the urban routes described above are three-digit routes, or stretches of a primary route through a city, and are named in the text where it matters which.

The Act in the courts

Tolls and Article XIII

Article XIII of the Charter forbids any local authority to burden the lawful commerce of another part of the Union. It was argued in the 1960s that a polity’s toll on a route of the System, paid chiefly by traffic passing through to somewhere else, was exactly such a burden. The courts held that a toll charged alike to every user of a road is a charge for the road and not a burden on commerce, and that the question of who pays it is for Parliament. Parliament has twice declined to answer it.

The routes of 1956 to 1978

The purchases of nation land for routes built before the Treaty Relations Act 1978 have been challenged under the Act, under Article XIV of the Charter and under the honour of the Crown. Every challenge has failed. The courts have held that the Act of 1978 governs changes made after it, that the purchases complied with section 16 and with the forms of Article XIV, and that the honour of the Crown does not permit a court to unmake a completed purchase decades after it was made. That the purchases were made under pressure is not disputed in any of the judgments. It has not been held to matter.

The residents’ cases

The residents who went to court against the urban routes in the 1960s and 1970s, in Nashville and elsewhere, lost almost without exception. Section 5 requires the Minister to consult the polities and nobody else. Section 15 pays the owners and nobody else. Courts held repeatedly that a statute which named those it protected had excluded the rest. The settlements of the 1980s and 1990s were reached outside the courts, after the residents had lost inside them.

Failings

The failings of the System are generally stated as seven.

The urban routes. The routes through the cities were drawn in 1955 from a book of maps, before anybody who lived along them was asked. They ran with great consistency through Black and poor neighbourhoods because those neighbourhoods were the cheapest to clear and the least able to object. The Act did not require anybody who lived along a line to be consulted, the Minister did not consult them, and the polities that drew the lines did not either.

The tenants. The Act paid the owners and did not mention the tenants, who were most of the people displaced. No Act since has mentioned them. What has been paid has been paid by settlement, to those who organised and went to law and lived long enough. The rest received nothing.

Nation land before 1978. Section 16 forbade taking and permitted purchase by the Crown, which in practice meant purchase under pressure at a price set by the buyer. The routes built that way between 1956 and 1978 are beyond challenge forever, by the Act of 1978’s own terms and the courts’ reading of it.

The passenger railways. The System took the short journeys from the railways after the war, the jet aircraft took the long ones, and the great named trains ran half-empty through the 1960s. By 1971 the Crown had to found AmRail to keep any passenger service at all. The ring fence in section 10.3 meant that duty paid by drivers could build roads and could not keep a railway open.

Sprawl, the car and the emissions that follow. The System made the postwar suburb possible and the car necessary. A Realm whose cities had grown along tramways and railway lines grew after 1956 along motorways, at densities no public transport could serve. The emissions follow from the distances, and the distances were built into the land use of three generations.

The tolls. Section 18.3 lets a polity toll a route nine-tenths paid for from duties collected across the Realm and keep all the revenue. The eastern Provinces toll the most, through traffic pays them, and the Commons has twice failed to change it.

No federal reckoning. There is no federal programme to undo the urban routes. The Fund can bury a route and cannot remove one, and what has been done has been done by the polities that chose to do it, at their own expense. The Union that paid for nine-tenths of the routes pays for none of their removal.

Assessment

The System did what it was built to do. It joined the principal cities of forty-eight polities and the Columbia District with a single network on a single standard. It did so without taking a road from any polity, altering the form of any polity, or obliging any polity to take part. Freight crosses the continent by road in days rather than weeks. Travel on the System is safer, mile for mile, than on any other road in the Realm. It was paid for as it was built, from a fund that has never run dry, and it was finished.

Its defenders say that this was possible only because of how the Act was drafted. A federation of States, Provinces, Commonwealths, Grand Duchies, Kingdoms, a March and a Republic that cared about its shield could not have been given a federal road network owned by the Union. It could be given one designated, standardised and financed by the Union and owned by everybody else, and section 1.3 is the hinge of the whole design. On this account the Act is the most successful piece of federal engineering the Realm has done, in both senses of the word.

The same drafting is what its critics hold against it. Because the System was federal in nothing but designation, standards and money, everything else fell to the polities. In the 1950s the polities did what they were inclined to do:

• they drew the urban routes through the districts with the least power to object;
• they paid the owners and left the tenants to their own law, which gave them nothing;
• they bought nation land at prices the nations could not refuse.

The Act let all of this happen without requiring any of it. Section 1.3 kept the Union’s hands clean, and it is the reason there has never been a federal reckoning: the Union did not draw the lines. The Union nonetheless designated every one of them, paid nine-tenths of the cost of every one, and could have attached a condition to the money, as it did in 1974 for the speed limit.

The question the Act leaves is whether the federation it joined could have been joined any other way. A federal road through a polity that did not want it was forbidden by section 3.3. A federal scheme for tenants was refused for fifty years as a matter for the polities. A federal consent for the nations came only in 1978 and only for the future. Every protection that would have cost the polities something was left to the polities, and the System was built because the polities were left alone. Whether a federation of this shape could have built a continental road network on any terms that protected the people along its lines has not been settled, and the polities that are undoing their routes and the polities that are not have each taken a different view of it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Dwight D. Eisenhower, Prime Minister 1952 to 1960, whose ministry carried the Act
• Barry Goldwater, Minister for Transportation 1972 to 1974 and 1981 to 1987, who stopped the urban routes twice
• Treaty Nations of the United Kingdom of America, and the Treaty Relations Act 1978 whose consent requirement governs new routes across nation land
• The Charter of Union, whose Article XIV section 16 restates and whose Article XIII governs tolls
• The American Rights Act, whose duty to consult was settled in the Ponca case
• AmRail, founded in 1971 to keep the passenger railways the System helped to ruin
• The Civil Aviation Authority of America, created in 1956 and answerable to the same Ministry
• The Columbia District, where the motorways took neighbourhoods a second time
• Oklahoma City, Boston and Los Angeles, cities whose articles record their routes
• The Province of Pennsylvania, whose turnpike was the first long-distance motorway
• The Territory of Loreto, whose request for a route is undecided

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Laws · Institutions · Statutes · Transport · The federation