Quote Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
Well, there's a difference between "murdering" businesses for societal greater good, and murdering them for misguided ambitions. There is no question that the country is far better off for having the interstate highway system than not. And those small businesses made the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good.

However, I don't think there is a shred of evidence to suggest that American cities that were mutilated by the system are better off for having the system traverse the inner cities. In fact, the evidence is quite the opposite. No other economically advanced nation that built a robust highway system did to their cities what we did to ours, and for that reason no other economically advanced nation has the degree of urban decay we have in our country. We did not gain anything by sending the freeways through our urban cores that the Germans missed out on by not doing so.
Ypu, thse little motels that survived have had to become "no tell motels".

Eisenhower would have preferred to have I-75 run straight from the Ohio Turnpike up to the Mackinac Bridge without going near Detroit. The reason that I-75 runs over and jogs though Detroit is because the Detroit politicians pushed for it. Detroit had a scheme for city expressways which predated the interstate highway program by a number of years. Detroit wanted expressways. By integrating their urban expressway scheme into the interstate program, they got Uncle Sugar to pick up 90% of the cost. As I recall, the expressways within the city limits were paid for as follows:

USA-90%
State of Michigan- 7.5%
Wayne County - 1.25%
City of Detroit-1.25%