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General

Legacy ID
21

John Steinbeck vs Charles Kuralt

Who Said It First?

The novelist John Steinbeck and CBS Newscaster Charles Kuralt knew and wrote about roads. Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939, is a classic of road literature; its description of Dust Bowl refugees driving to California along U.S. 66 has...

Urban Design Principles

To help the authorities, Interregional Highways included a 16-page section on "Principles of Route Selection in Cities" and followed it with a 4-page section on "Illustrations of Principles of Route Selection." The principles (quoted here with minimal ellipses for ease of...

Our Cities Their Role in the National Economy

The following information is from W. Lee Mertz' "Origins of the Interstate System," which can be found elsewhere on this website. This excerpt describes the 1937 report Our Cities:

In setting the background for the Interstate System, there was yet another activity going on in...

Naming the Interstate System

The following is an expanded version of a sidebar accompanying "The Genie in the Bottle" (Public Roads, September/October 2000).

The proper name for the proposed expressway system came up unexpectedly when Thomas H. MacDonald, Chief of the Bureau of Public...

Designating the Urban Interstates

by Richard F. Weingroff

The urban Interstates proved to be the most difficult to build. They would have been difficult in any event because of the physical challenge of building freeways on new locations in an urban setting. However, they also proved...

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Many of the studies conducted using HSIS data result in publication in professional journals, dissertations, theses, conference proceedings, research records, and other peer-reviewed documents.