After 35 Years, Nation’s Ribbon of Interstates Nearly Complete : Transportation: It has profoundly influenced the country’s evolution. When Eisenhower began the system, he envisioned an American Autobahn.

By the end of this decade, the greatest construction project in history--bigger than the Roman aqueducts or the Pyramids, greater than the Great Wall of China--will be complete.

A system that soars over mountains, spans rivers and bays and plains, is expected to end within the bowels of Boston sometime around 1998. The most productive partnership ever between the federal and state governments will have accomplished its goal:

Forty-four thousand miles of four-lane-plus, limited access, grade-separated, high-speed, coast-to-coast and border-to-border highway.

The interstate highway system.

It will have cost $129 billion--$500 from each and every American. And though it will account for barely 1% of the road mileage in the country, the interstate system will carry more than 20% of the nation’s traffic.

It is hard to imagine another public works project affecting so many people or so imprinting itself on a nation’s psyche. What American hasn’t experienced the exhilaration of racing across the wide-open landscape on streamers of asphalt that stretch unfettered to the horizon?

“One of the things I loved hearing years ago was, ‘Coast to coast without a stoplight,’ ” said George Viverette, director of highway transportation for the American Automobile Assn.

“Of course,” he conceded, “not many people drove coast to coast. But the concept was good.”

Ah yes, the concept.

It was intended, quite simply, as a way to get traffic from one place to another and, not incidentally, for the Army to get its equipment from one place to another. It is no accident that the official Department of Transportation history of the interstate system is subtitled, “Roads for National Defense.”

But the interstate went much further than that.

Consider this from Kenneth Jackson, professor of history at Columbia University and author of “Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States”:

“I would say the interstate highway system has probably been the single greatest influence on urban development since the invention of the automobile.”

Not all urbanologists go that far. But it is hard to find one who will say the interstate hasn’t profoundly influenced the way Americans live, work and drive.

The interstate system didn’t create the suburbs, but it nourished them. It didn’t invent the truck, but it was as important to the trucking industry as rails to a train. It didn’t cause air pollution, but it was a major contributor. It didn’t destroy inner cities, but it helped send them on the road to ruin.

“What it did,” said Peter Muller, a geography professor at the University of Miami, “was change the situation in which the downtown was the most accessible place in the metropolitan area.”

Now, Muller argues, the most accessible place is along the belt of interstate highway that girds most big cities--the three-digit numbers such as I-285 in Atlanta, I-435 in Kansas City or I-610 in Houston.

Or I-495 in Washington, better known as the Washington Beltway, which has become a metaphor for the federal government itself. It is the ultimate ring road, clustered with urban developments such as Tyson’s Corner, Va., which rings up more retail sales than downtown Washington itself.

The interstate has changed the way American business does business. Companies are no longer tied to rail lines; now their umbilical cord is the interstate.

“I would tell you this,” said Robert Ady, president of PHH Fantus Corp., a Chicago-based consulting firm that helps businesses decide where to relocate. “As far as our manufacturing clients are concerned, 70% of them have a requirement of (being near) the interstate highway. Interstate highway access is very high on their agenda.”

Interstates have helped American businesses follow the Japanese lead of “just-in-time” inventory systems, in which parts are made and shipped as needed, rather than warehoused.

And even non-manufacturing businesses have discovered that they no longer need to be in central cities. They can follow their workers along the highways to the suburbs.

In fact, Muller argues that, thanks in part to the interstate system, “the term ‘suburb’ is obsolete. It isn’t ‘sub’ to the ‘urb.’ We’re in a whole new ballgame. A whole new urban world has emerged.”

If you had to pick a date when the new world was born, you might consider June 29, 1956, when President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway and Revenue Act, funding the interstate system.

But the interstate concept can be taken back further, at least to 1944, when Congress established a National System of Interstate Highways. This established most of the basic routes that exist today, but there wasn’t enough money in the bill to build them.

Perhaps most romantically, the origins of the interstate might be found in the most popular exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair: General Motors’ Futurama.

This remarkably prescient glimpse promised motorists that in the far-off world of 1960, their cars would--get this!--”join the Motorway at the same speed as cars traveling in the lane they entered.”

This is now known as the merge lane.

They would be able to “make right and left turns at speeds up to 50 m.p.h.”

This is now known as the banked curve.

Perhaps not so accurately, they would be able to drive “at designated speeds of 50, 75 and 100 m.p.h.”

This is now known as speeding.

“Who can say what new horizons lie before us?” the narrator of the exhibit asked.

One answer: Dwight D. Eisenhower.

As Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, Ike had seen how the German army zipped around on Adolf Hitler’s Autobahn. He wanted an American Autobahn, and he was willing to put federal money where his mouth was.

The bill signed by Eisenhower established an innovative partnership. The federal government would pay 90% of the cost of building the interstate system, and would write the design standards for the roads. The states would put up 10%, build the roads and control the precise routes they took. They also would maintain them.

Right off the bat, some existing highways were designated as interstates, including some toll roads. In general, interstate highways were supposed to be freeways, free of tolls.

They also were supposed to meet the high standards set forth by the federal government, but there were exceptions. One of the most notorious was the Boston section of I-93, known locally as the Central Artery.

The Central Artery, pronounced by Bostonians as if it were a refuge for otters, ripped straight through downtown Boston, whose 17th-Century streets were coping poorly with 20th-Century transportation.

It was completed in the late 1950s, just as the interstate system was beginning to take shape. Traffic in Boston has not gotten better since.

Don Marshall has an office in Boston’s South Station, one of the great shrines to the railroad. From his office window, he has a postcard view of traffic whizzing by on the Central Artery, one of the lesser shrines to the automobile.

Actually, the traffic only whizzes by from about 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and that’s on a good day. Before and after that, the view Marshall sees is of a slowly moving river of cars. Except when it stops altogether.

“This is the choke point for the whole New England region,” Marshall said.

It is Marshall’s task, as an engineer for the Bechtel Corp., to unchoke it. He is overseeing the $5-billion Central Artery-Third Harbor Tunnel Project, which recently received final approval from the federal Department of Transportation.

Already, buildings are being demolished in the right-of-way of the Third Harbor Tunnel, which will extend the Massachusetts Turnpike--I-90--about 2.7 miles across South Boston and under Boston Harbor. It will come out at Logan Airport, which is in easy view of downtown Boston and several eternities away at rush hour.

The rest of the project involves construction of a new, streamlined Central Artery under the old one. Eventually, the designers envision a greenbelt where today’s highway runs; traffic will slip unseen beneath it.

The target date for completion is 1998. There are about 260 miles of other interstate projects under construction around the country, but none is expected to take that long. Hence, Boston’s distinction as the likely end of the road.

Boston’s original Central Artery was not designed as an interstate, but it is typical of the early interstates in at least one respect: It was built with what seems today like complete disregard for the city around it.

“They just plowed down all the buildings in the way,” said Jeffrey J. Brunetti, one of the engineers managing the redesign of the artery. “You could never do that today.”

Today, Brunetti and his colleagues must cope with what seems, to them, like an endless round of neighborhood meetings and environmental reviews and government decisions.

“For an engineer, it is a bit frustrating,” Brunetti conceded. “You know, you understand it and you can see the value of it . . . but there’s a point of diminishing returns that you get to pretty quickly.”

In the early days of the interstate, it wasn’t that way. Historians Mark Rose and Bruce Seely have written about a time when young, ambitious engineers were given a free hand to design roads as they saw fit. The Interstate Highway System was engineering heaven--at least for a time.

“One result was a program that was technically adequate and occasionally even first-rate,” they wrote.

Another result was the wholesale devastation of large swathes of inner cities--typically those inhabited by the poor and black.

In New Orleans, Interstate 10 “basically wiped out a vibrant minority community,” said Arthur Nelson, an associate professor of city planning and public policy at Georgia Tech.

There have been similar complaints in other cities as well, most notably Miami, where residents of the predominantly black Overtown neighborhood still complain about the destruction wrought by I-95.

By the mid- to late 1960s, environmental and community activism began to slow the unrestricted growth of the interstate system. Roads began taking longer to plan and build. Some were never built.

Interstate 95 was supposed to go straight through Boston--eight lanes of superhighway consuming everything in its path. That was stopped in the early 1970s, and Boston was able to cash in its share of federal funds to expand its mass transit system.

Other projects in other cities were delayed or canceled as well. The most famous may have been New York City’s Westway project, a $2-billion interstate along the Hudson River that now sleeps with the fishes--the striped bass whose existence was purportedly endangered by the road.

In 1988, the U.S. Department of Transportation classified just 57% of the pavement in the Interstate Highway System as being in good condition. The rest ranged from fair to wretched.

That assessment worries the people who depend on interstate highways--and the people who pay to maintain them.

“The bottom line,” said John Hill Jr. of the General Accounting Office, in testimony to Congress, “is that the ride on 43% of the nation’s premier highway system may be barely tolerable or worse.”

And many interstates, regardless of their condition, are so congested as to mock their intention as high-speed roads.

Under a new transportation plan proposed by President Bush, the federal government will continue to pay 90% of the cost of most interstate maintenance. But that doesn’t mean the federal government will provide enough money to maintain all interstates to the satisfaction of their users.

In other words, the forecast for at least some of the interstate system calls for continued slow and bumpy driving.

What would the United States be without the interstate? The Soviet Union, one transportation official suggests--a nation unable to get goods from one place to another. Mexico, says another.

Give us a break, say other scholars. If the federal government hadn’t built the interstate system, someone else would have. The United States without the interstate system would be . . . about the same as the United States with the interstate system. The interstate just wouldn’t be called the interstate.

It hardly matters who is right. The interstate is there, from H-1 in Hawaii to I-95 down the Eastern Seaboard; from I-10 across the South to I-90 across the North. It binds the nation, congests the nation and keeps it infernally, internally combustible.

And besides, how else can you get coast to coast without a stoplight?