They also decided to call these roads 'free roads,' a term that was later replaced by 'freeways.' Norton argues that this naming shift was essential in persuading the federal government - and the public - to shift away from tolls. But auto groups recognized that funding public roads through taxes on gasoline would allow highways to expand much more quickly. In the 1930s, there were already privately owned toll roads in the East, and some public toll highways, like the Pennsylvania Turnpike, were under construction. The first step was changing how roads were funded. So 'there was a really successful effort by people with a stake in the automotive industry to characterize road-building as a public responsibility,' says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The auto industry didn't want the same thing to happen to highways.

After all, most cities had just ripped up their streetcar networks because they were privately owned systems that weren't making money. These groups realized the nation's transportation system needed to be reframed entirely - as a public responsibility. The roots of the interstate system go back to the 1930s, when General Motors, AAA, and other industry groups formed the National Highway Users Conference to influence federal transportation policy.

'There was also a racially motivated desire to eliminate what people called 'urban blight.' The funds were seen as a way to fix the urban core by replacing blight with freeways.' How freeways became 'free'

'There was an immense amount of funding that would go to local governments for building freeways, but they had little to no influence over where they'd go,' says Joseph DiMento, a law professor who co-wrote Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways. So why did cities help build the expressways that would so profoundly decimate them? The answer involves a mix of self-interested industry groups, design choices made by people far away, a lack of municipal foresight, and outright institutional racism. Downtown Minneapolis in 1953, versus today.

Vox on two national development