Good roads and the automobile in the United States 1880-1929.

Abstract

The initial adoption of the automobile in the United States was in the prosperous NE states. Before World War I, state funds built networks of good roads that primarily benefited the economic elite. A second phase was the adoption of the automobile by the urban middle class and in rural areas. Increased use of the automobile led to active federal participation in the good-roads movement in 1916. The destruction of prewar state-funded roads by wartime truck traffic resulted in technological and managerial changes in the organization of road building. War-surplus machinery, federal funding of hard-surfaced roads, and further diffusion of inexpensive automobiles produced the first countrywide highway network in the 1920s. -Author