Don’t look for parties or commemorations from Route 66 aficionados regarding the 50th anniversary of interstates in the United States this year. Interstates are universally cited as the reason for Route 66’s downfall in the 1970s and ’80s.
The Mother Road started a comeback in the 1990s, but not before hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses went broke and disappeared because of lack of traffic.
The man who has received most of the blame from Route 66ers is President Dwight D. Eisenhower. This article tells how the seed of the interstates started:
In 1919, a young army captain was one of almost 300 army troops who departed from Washington, D.C., in the first military auto caravan ever undertaken by the military to drive across America. Talk about bad roads: the group averaged just five miles per hour and it took over two months, 62 days to be exact, for them to reach the destination of San Francisco, Calif. After years of service, including WWII, where he saw the German autobahn system, the professional soldier retired from the military.
And now as Paul Harvey might say, “Here’s the rest of the story!
Actually, how many former roads did Route 66 put out of business when it was built? In Illinois, Highway 4 was mostly obliterated. Also, the bypasses which were so prevalent in the latter days of the road no doubt caused downtown businesses to fail.