boorstin20

Front Trtrueler to Touritt:

of jokes and folklore. Now the train is dying out as a means of long-distance travel. And if we travel by air we are seldora aloft long enough to strike up nojy afcquai;itances. But for meeting new people the private automoFile is the least prom-ising of all. Even hitchhikers are slowly becoming obsolete as well as illegal.    __^

The nątion-wide route numberin^ systeip, with its stand-ardized sigmT of the new era, was aitoptćci in 1925 by the Joint Board of State and Federal Highways, supposedly to eliminate “confusion” from the “motley array” of signs which differed from place to place. Even before our new transcon-tinental super highways it was not necessary to know where you were (provided you could remember the number of your route) or where you had to go to reach your destination. Today when we ask directions we usually inquire not for a place but for a number.

Super highways have been the climax in homogenizing the motorist’s landscape. A friend of minę recently drove his family from Chicago to New York on one of these tollways. His boy had heard about the prosperous Ohio farms and wanted to visit one. But this proved too difficult. Once on the super highway (with not a traffic light to stop them), they seemed morę remote than ever from the environing farms. Where would one leave the toll road? How and where could one return?

As late as the early years of this century in the United States the generał demand was for roads extending only two to five miles from railroad stations. Then the Federal Highway Act of 1921 began to co-ordinate State highways and to standardize road-building practice. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1944 established the new National System of Interstate Highways, an arterial network of 40,000 miles planned to reach forty-two State capitals, and to serve 182 of the 199 cities in the country having populations over 50,-000. There has been an increasing tendency to concentrate road improvements on these most-used roads, which become morę and morę like one another in every respect. The seven-hundred-odd thousand miles of Federal Aid roads (primary and secondary) make up only a quarter of the total rural road mileage in the United States. Yet they serve almost 90 per cent of the total rural highway travel. An increasing pro-portion of passengers go over well-traveled roads. The better traveled the roads, the morę they become assimilated to one another. Economy and good engineering require that they traverse the dullest cxpanses of the landscape.

Increase in motor travel, both for business and pleasure, has changed the character of lodgings en route. Formerly the motorist seeking good lodging en route had to detour through the heart of the city. There he could not avoid a view of the courthouse, the shops, the industrial, commercial, and resi-dential districts. Now the motel makes all this unnecessary. Meanwhile, city planners and traffic engineers, hoping to re-duce congestion in urban centers, spend large sums on by-passes and super highways to prevent the long-distance motorist from becoming entangled in the daily life of their com-munity.

Motor courts sprang up during the depression of the 1930’s. The earliest tourist cabins were simply a cheaper alternative to the hotel, resembling camping facilities. But within a decade motor courts were improved and standard-ized. In 1935, the first year for which the Department of Commerce reported statistics, there were about ten thousand motels or tourist courts; after twenty years there were some thirty thousand. The new chains and associations of motels soon enabled a motorist to use the same brand of soap, the same cellophane-covered drinking glasses, and the same “sanitized” toilet seats all the way across the country. The long-distance motorist, usually anxious to avoid the “business route,” then needed to wander no morę than a few hundred yards off the super highway for his food and lodging. What he secures in one place is indistinguishable from that in another. One thing motels everywhere have in common is the etlort of their managers to fabricate an inoffensive bit of “local atmosphere.”

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