US Interstate Highway System
Author: Nora Lewis
Suggested citation:
Lewis, N. (2026). US Interstate Highway System. Technology Assessment Project Case Study Library, University of Michigan. https://stpp.fordschool.umich.edu/tap-case-study-library/us-interstate-highway-system
US Interstate Highway System
Key Takeaways
- This infrastructure is often difficult to dissent against because of progress framing, and marginalized communities can face greater public health harms, financial inequity, and social disconnectedness as a result.
- Infrastructure may also reinforce greater resource usage, such as energy consumption, fossil fuel reliance, and inefficient land use.
Brief History of Interstate Highways in the US
In the wake of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was interested in promoting highway construction as a means of job creation (Weingroff, 2024). The need to spur a ravaged economy may have been the central reasoning for FDR's support of highway infrastructure, but under the Eisenhower administration 20 years later, narratives tended to revolve around connectivity, modernization, and leaning into postwar American prosperity (Weingroff, 2003). The United States was now steadfastly becoming the most car-centric nation in the world, and the growth of suburbia came hand-in-hand with roads that could enable decentralized development. Up until 1956, several iterations of The Federal-Aid Highway Act had made large paved roads more commonplace, but these systems were largely unconnected and isolated around major U.S. cities (Terrell, 2024). The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, sometimes called the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, authorized the construction of 41,000 miles of the Interstate Highway System (Weber, 2012). This piece of legislation fostered more efficient and widespread transportation across the country, yet also fostered the rampant and racially exclusionary development of suburbs (Mahajan, 2024; Weiwu, 2024). Importantly, the transition of funding and planning oversight shifted away from local governments to state and federal entities under this act, which greatly affected the inclusion of community input in mapping these highways.
Efficiency, Connectedness, and Modernity
A central goal of strengthened interstate highway infrastructure was to allow for people and goods to be more efficiently transported throughout the United States (Weingroff, 2023). While alternative forms of transport like steamships and railroads had been appealing throughout the 19th and early 20th century, roadways were now becoming the most promising form of domestic goods transport. By expanding roads so they reached an "economies of scale" of sorts, trucking was now the most timely, cost-effective, and convenient form of transportation (Weingroff, 2023). With an interconnected system, there were more localized and direct pathways for the exchange of goods.
This convenience didn't just shape the behavior of goods markets, but also more broadly the behavior of the American people. For those that could afford a car, the resources of urban spaces were accessible from periphery suburban settlements. One didn't need to live directly in the city to use its shopping centers, museums, theaters, or hospitals. With this connectedness, "white flight" was further emboldened, allowing the white middle class to live within their picket fences and away from inner-city and largely Black communities (Boustan, 2010).
National Security and Emergency Resilience
Shiny new developments and miles of asphalt ushered in an era of new American prosperity. As the Cold War took shape, there was a tacit need to both solidify American power and stability to the world, and also ensure that infrastructure prepared the United States for potential conflict (Arcadi, 2022). Though often less of a central talking point, the name National Interstate and Defense Highways Act alludes to the era's anxieties over foreign attack (Weingroff, 2017). The thinking was that better road connectivity would make citizen evacuation in an emergency more efficient, allowing for the risks targeting major cities to be decentralized into outlying communities. The movement of soldiers or military aid across the country could also be conducted more efficiently, a consideration that held importance with the threat of nuclear attack looming over much of the population (Weingroff, 2017).
Induced Demand
Though highway infrastructure made strides in transportation efficiency compared to the horse-drawn carriages and dirt roads of the past, efficiency is not promised on modern highways. Induced demand has been a persistent plague on American roadways since the 1960s, where highway capacity is increased to treat congestion, but ultimately encourages more usage of roads and worsens efficiency concerns (Mann, 2014). This development is cyclical, prompting excessive carbon emissions, gas consumption, and road construction under the guise of shorter commutes. The perpetual money pit of these combined factors seeks to bog down the economic benefits of such infrastructure. It further promotes car usage that is untenable with current decarbonization efforts, and deeply harmful for the health of surrounding communities and ecosystems (Mann, 2014). As we continue to battle the insatiable nature of induced demand, we fail to assign nearly enough resources toward public transportation efforts.
Sprawled Community Development and Land-Use Inequities
Connected to the induced demand problem is the problem of decentralized development. The two are inextricably linked, with suburban development driving a heightened reliance on highways to get to and from housing communities to places of work. By creating distinct divisions in where people live and work or shop, cars are a necessary middleman for everyday life (Hymel, 2019). Roads themselves allow suburban communities to settle further and further outside urban centers without being cut off from resources and comforts (Levkovich et al., 2020). The centrality of highways to these developments has also vastly lessened the mobility of individuals within their own communities. Those unable to afford a car are forced to rely on walking, biking, or underdeveloped public transportation to move around, methods that tend to carry higher risk and less efficiency (Anderson & Galaskiewicz, 2021; Taylor et al., 2023). Disparities in quality of life are thus reinforced within suburban communities in particular, where wealth inequality is already rampant. Communities unable to maintain their roadway infrastructure also face diminished mobility, further demonstrating the quick dissolution of benefits of highways depending on community wealth (Norwood, 2021).
In urban communities, highways have had a similarly destructive effect. Roadways were strategically routed through Black and poor neighborhoods, bisecting entire communities (King, 2021). Acquiring land in these areas was cheaper and easier than targeting development in wealthier and whiter communities, where residents might have more political and social cache to fight such infrastructure (King, 2021). Not only did the physical demolition of these communities cast an appalling toll on many Black inner-city Americans, but it also exposed them to a slew of health impacts that persist today. The harmful emissions released from cars, as well as safety threats from fast-moving vehicles and pervasive noise pollution, all made quality of life for these residents significantly worse (Kerr et al., 2024). Proximity to busy and polluted highways has also lessened the property value of these homes, curtailing the ability of community members to receive housing loans and accumulate wealth like white and wealthy residents might (Karas, 2015). Targeting Black and low-income communities was seen as a necessary repercussion for connected roadways and a more modernized American life, yet the benefits of connectivity and mobility have been swiftly canceled out by this discriminatory siting.
Asphalt Plants and the Cyclical Harm of Supply Chains
To support highway infrastructure as massive as that in the United States, we've needed a seemingly endless supply of paving materials. Asphalt is the most common product of choice for surface roads and parking lots, a dark substance made of stone, sand, and the sticky, petroleum-derived bitumen. Weather and road use often give way to the periodic cracking and crumbling of these roads, an inevitability which feeds into an insatiable demand for more and more of the material. The production of asphalt predictably has harmful implications for the environment and nearby communities. It is high in volatile organic compounds (VOCs), dangerous chemicals that are emitted as a gas in the process of asphalt mixing (Chong et al., 2013). Exposure to such substances can cause an array of negative health effects, including skin irritation, chronic headaches, and respiratory illnesses, as well as greater ozone formation (Florkova et al., 2021).
Like much of risky manufacturing infrastructure, the location of these asphalt plants is not random. Communities of color and low-income Americans feel the brunt of air pollution in the United States, and asphalt plants represent just one piece in this puzzle. In Flint, Michigan, community members organized a campaign against an Ajax asphalt plant on the outskirts of the city, located across from a public housing development (Allnutt, 2023). The plant was approved for operation in 2023, following an array of lawsuits from concerned community members and environmental groups dating back to 2021. They reasoned that the plant posed acute health risks to the majority-Black Flint community and furthered environmental racism (Thompson, 2022). Despite the case's upsetting final outcome, the actions of the community pushed the Ajax plant and Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy to adopt more stringent air pollution guidelines. A similar movement sprouted up in nearby Detroit, a city riddled with many toxic manufacturing sites associated with its historic auto industry. In 2022, Asphalt Specialists Inc. proposed the creation of a plant next to the North Rosedale Park neighborhood in northwest Detroit (Brooker, 2022). The site would have been located in close proximity to a park, a school, and many nearby homes, prompting a community campaign against the plant's permitting. The city eventually rejected Asphalt Specialists Inc.'s proposal, making it the only manufacturing permit out of 82 to be denied by the city government since 2020 (Brooker, 2022). This outcome was rare, but the need for community mobilization against racist industrial siting is unfortunately far from uncommon.
Asphalt itself absorbs large quantities of heat instead of reflecting it back into the atmosphere, which fosters "heat islands" that can make heavily-paved landscapes unhealthily hot (National Integrated Heat Health Information System, n.d.). Further, the material is highly impermeable, meaning that poor stormwater management and polluted runoff from roadways remains pervasive. Beyond the environmental degradation linked to asphalt, and by extension highway construction and car dependency, the supply chain for constructing roads fosters the unequal and racialized distribution of air pollution (Lester, 2022). Induced demand is thus not just a costly problem of inefficiency, but a driver of environmental racism. In the face of climate change, these problems seek to only worsen, particularly for communities in close proximity to highways and asphalt plants.
The Reclamation of New Orleans's Claiborne Avenue
Despite the destructive impacts of highways on communities of color across the United States, there have been widespread efforts to reclaim these spaces disrupted by such infrastructure. One of the more hopeful examples of such reclamation efforts comes about in New Orleans. The city's Tremé neighborhood is reportedly the first Black neighborhood in Louisiana, but faced the wrath of the Claiborne expressway that effectively cleared 200 historic oak trees and 155 individual properties in 1968 (Blankenhorn, 2023). The enclave of Black commerce and robust cultural pride went from housing 123 businesses in 1950 to just 44 by 2000 (WWNO, 2016). Despite years of protests from community members rightfully angered by the looming presence of overpasses in their once-flourishing neighborhood, the project's harm wasn't federally acknowledged until 2021. The Biden administration identified the Claiborne expressway as one of two highways targeted in an initiative to "reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments" as part of a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package (DiColo, 2021). One Tremé resident, Amy Stelly, co-founded a non-profit architecture and urban design organization called Claiborne Avenue Alliance in 2017, which has led community-based demands for the removal of the highway and more "thoughtful development of the Claiborne Corridor" (Claiborne Avenue Alliance, n.d.). Stelly and the Claiborne Avenue Alliance have encountered pushback from the New Orleans city government and Louisiana state government, who submitted a proposal to the federal government in 2022 asking for a $47 million grant to remove expressway ramps and add pedestrian spaces around the expressway rather than remove it completely (Blankenhorn, 2023). The federal government ultimately only awarded the city-state plan a mere $500,000, which Stelly has highlighted as a sign of their disapproval of the plan's shortcomings. Stelly now works with a public health team based at Louisiana State University to conduct air pollution mapping in the surrounding neighborhood under an EPA grant, hoping to illustrate the expressway's detrimental environmental and health impacts to bolster removal (Blankenhorn, 2023).
Though the problem remains unresolved, Claiborne Avenue Alliance is a crucial example of a potent grassroots campaign that has stirred broader discourse over reclamation. Tremé's use of a bottom-up approach to address the harms of highway infrastructure remains a model to the many communities across the U.S. grappling with similar loss.
Relevance to Advanced Nuclear Energy
We chose this as a large infrastructure analog, particularly one that was underpinned by nationalism and "greater good narratives" from the federal government. We were interested in the siting equity questions surrounding highways, and how they have targeted and destabilized marginalized communities. We found that highways were a good example of infrastructure that has shaped our behavior and consumption habits in major ways, particularly in support of the fossil fuel industry, a car dependent culture, and rampant land use. The case reaffirmed that infrastructure purported to serve the greater good often has a more specific pool of beneficiaries (and concurrent lifestyles) in mind. In the context of AN, this case displays how public health and quality of life harms are often concentrated among marginalized communities when large infrastructure projects are built. Although highways were positioned as an efficient and connected path to the future, they actually concentrated risks among marginalized communities and encouraged greater resource usage and environmental degradation. AN is at risk of doing the same thing if its siting falls along similarly inequitable lines.
Key Sources
Karas, D. (2015). Highway to inequity: The disparate impact of the interstate highway system on poor and minority communities in American cities. New Visions for Public Affairs, 7.
King, N. (2021, April 7). A brief history of how racism shaped interstate highways. NPR.
Mahajan, A. (2024). Highways and segregation. Journal of Urban Economics, 141, 103574.
Terrell, E. (n.d.). National System of Interstate and Defense Highways Act signed into law. Library of Congress, Research Guides. Retrieved March 25, 2025.
Weber, J. (2012). The evolving interstate highway system and the changing geography of the United States. Journal of Transport Geography, 25, 70-86.
Weingroff, R. (2024, March 25). A moment in time: FDR and the Federal-Aid Highway Program Part 1: Roosevelt applies the brakes. U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration.
Weingroff, R. F. (2003, September 1). President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Role in Highway Safety. U.S. Department of Transportation.
WWNO. (2016, May 5). "The monster": Claiborne Avenue before and after the interstate.
References
Anderson, K. F., & Galaskiewicz, J. (2021). Racial/ethnic residential segregation, socioeconomic inequality, and job accessibility by public transportation networks in the United States. Spatial Demography, 9(3), 341-373.
Arcadi, T. (2022). Partisanship and permanence: How Congress contested the origins of the interstate highway system and the future of American infrastructure. Modern American History, 5(1), 53-77.
Blankenhorn, G. (2023, May 2). The resilience of Tremé: The fight to reclaim Claiborne Avenue. Krewe Magazine.
Boustan, L. P. (2010). Was postwar suburbanization "white flight"? Evidence from the Black migration. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 125(1), 417-443.
Brooker, J. (2022, February 10). How a group of Detroit neighbors took on an asphalt plant. Detour Detroit.
Chong, D., Wang, Y., Guo, H., & Lu, Y. (2014). Volatile organic compounds generated in asphalt pavement construction and their health effects on workers. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 140(2).
Claiborne Avenue Alliance. (n.d.). Claiborne Avenue Alliance design studio. Retrieved March 25, 2025.
Detroit, B. A., Planet. (2023, August 18). How EGLE's response to a Flint civil rights complaint could impact Detroit. BridgeDetroit.
DiColo, J. (2021, March 31). Biden infrastructure plan would "redress historic inequities," like this New Orleans highway. NOLA.com.
Florkova, Z., Sedivy, S., & Pastorkova, J. (2021). The environmental impact of asphalt mixtures production for road infrastructure. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 1015(1).
Hymel, K. (2019). If you build it, they will drive: Measuring induced demand for vehicle travel in urban areas. Transport Policy, 76, 57-66.
Karas, D. (2015). Highway to inequity: The disparate impact of the interstate highway system on poor and minority communities in American cities. New Visions for Public Affairs, 7.
Kerr, G. H., van Donkelaar, A., Martin, R. V., Brauer, M., Bukart, K., Wozniak, S., Goldberg, D. L., & Anenberg, S. C. (2024). Increasing racial and ethnic disparities in ambient air pollution-attributable morbidity and mortality in the United States. Environmental Health Perspectives, 132(3).
King, N. (2021, April 7). A brief history of how racism shaped interstate highways. NPR.
Lester, S. (2022, March 2). A bad place for an asphalt plant: An African American community fights back. The Center for Health, Environment & Justice.
Levkovich, O., Rouwendal, J., & van Ommeren, J. (2020). The impact of highways on population redistribution: The role of land development restrictions. Journal of Economic Geography, 20(3), 783-808.
Mahajan, A. (2024). Highways and segregation. Journal of Urban Economics, 141, 103574.
Mann, A. (2014, June 17). What's up with that: Building bigger roads actually makes traffic worse. Wired.
National Integrated Heat Health Information System. (n.d.). Urban Heat Islands. HEAT.Gov. Retrieved March 25, 2025.
Norwood, C. (2021, April 23). How infrastructure has historically promoted inequality. PBS News.
Taylor, N. L., Porter, J. M., Bryan, S., Harmon, K. J., & Sandt, L. S. (2023). Structural racism and pedestrian safety: Measuring the association between historical redlining and contemporary pedestrian fatalities across the United States, 2010-2019. American Journal of Public Health.
Terrell, E. (n.d.). National System of Interstate and Defense Highways Act signed into law. Library of Congress, Research Guides. Retrieved March 25, 2025.
Thompson, C. (2022, February 14). Citing racism, Flint residents take fight over Ajax asphalt plant to court. The Detroit News.
Weber, J. (2012). The evolving interstate highway system and the changing geography of the United States. Journal of Transport Geography, 25, 70-86.
Weingroff, R. (2017, June 27). Highway history: Interstate system: Civil defense, 1955. U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration.
Weingroff, R. (2023, June 30). Moving the goods: As the interstate era begins. U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration.
Weingroff, R. (2024, March 25). A moment in time: FDR and the Federal-Aid Highway Program Part 1: Roosevelt applies the brakes. U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration.
Weingroff, R. F. (2003, September 1). President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the federal role in highway safety. U.S. Department of Transportation.
Weiwu, L. (n.d.). Unequal access: Racial segregation and the distributional impacts of interstate highways in cities.
WWNO. (2016, May 5). "The monster": Claiborne Avenue before and after the interstate.
Photo: Four Level Interchange Fort Worth at Intersection of IH 20 and IH 35. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Public Roads / Public domain, via National Archives (NAID 276537856)