Today is the 50th anniversary of the Interstate Highway System, which was signed into existence on this date in 1956 by Eisenhower. Since our car-obsessed culture is currently being served a double wake-up call in the form of climate crisis and $3-dollar-per-gallon gas, there couldn’t be a more perfect moment for a critical look at our largest shared piece of infrastructure. So how does America’s circulatory system look in its middle age? The consensus is: “not too good.” From crumbling roadways in the mountain West, to privatization and tolls in Indiana and Illinois, the highways that united the country while (arguably) hastening the decline of regional culture are arriving at this mile-marker in a troubled state. Citizens of Memphis, TN chose to celebrate today in honor of a four-mile stretch of I-40 that was never built, and in Boston, the cost of the “Big Dig” to bury the troublesome inner-city stretch of I-93 is currently running over $14.6 billion. Even the plot of Cars the current Disney/Pixar effort hinges on an evil interstate sucking the life out of a town on a less-traveled secondary road. When Disney turns against such an integral part of Americana, it’s fair to say that something is wrong. But the IHS isn’t without its champions: Ike’s great-grandson led a convoy of classic cars, trailers and trucks along the route of a cross-country military transport survey in 1919 that originally inspired his great-grandpa. They arrived in DC today in time for a welcome from members of congress and auto-lobbying groups. The project was underwritten by Bridgestone, the American Trucking Association, Daimler-Chrysler and others with a vested interest in keeping the Interstate system vital. The Washington Post’s Hank Steuver, sums things up nicely in a piece published today, arguing that though the Interstates never get the “American dream” treatment – they are in fact our national reality, and they deserve a closer look at both the bad and good, then they often get.

Even before the highway act was signed we were already going suburban; we were already homogenizing, Woolworthizing, turning Texacoid, watching for the next orange roof of Howard Johnson’s. The interstate didn’t create us, it is us; it is something we built.

The interstate is one of the few places we can all feel good about having paid our taxes. Could anything this expensive, so fought over in Washington at budget time, ever feel so apart from pure politics, once you’re out on it, once you’re sailing along?