Been spending a lot of time on the Interstates over the past month or so-almost 1000 miles in the new Chevy Malibu as part of our grueling 11,306-mile test across America (see page 34), nearly 800 miles in our Jaguar XKR long termer for a Thanksgiving trip to San Francisco and the Napa Valley, and more than 400 miles to Yosemite National Park and back for an exhilarating blast over the 9945-feet Tioga Pass in the 600-horsepower Bentley Continental GT Speed before the snow closed it until next May. I think it was somewhere north of Boise, Idaho, at the wheel of the surprisingly accomplished Malibu, that I suddenly realized America's Interstates are a national treasure.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower laid the foundation for the Interstate system back in 1956, when he signed legislation that formalized funding for a national grid of highways. Eisenhower had long understood the importance of good roads: In 1919, he'd been part of a military convoy that had taken 62 grueling days to cross America via the largely unimproved Lincoln Highway; in the 1930s, he'd been tasked with mapping the roads of France for their military value, knowledge that proved invaluable as the Allies fought their way across Europe after D-Day in 1944.
But it was when he saw Germany's network of four-lane superhighways-the autobahnen-constructed to facilitate the rapid deployment of troops and munitions, that Eisenhower had an automotive epiphany: "The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land," he wrote in his 1967 memoir, "At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends."
Today, the Interstate network is composed of more than 46,000 miles of multilane highway. It connects 45 of the 50 state capitals and has over 55,500 bridges, 14,750 interchanges, and 82 tunnels. It reaches 11,158 feet crossing the Great Divide near Denver, Colorado, and sinks to 52 feet below sea level in the desert near El Centro, California. The coast-to-coast trip that took Eisenhower 62 days in 1919 took me just five days in a Shelby GT500 last year, even with stops for photography and testing, thanks to the Interstates.
These days environmentalists tend to regard roads as yester-tech: expensive, unsafe contributors to urban sprawl and global warming. But I realized, as I followed the route of the Oregon Trail in the Malibu, that in the Interstates, America has the bones of a fast, flexible, and efficient future transport network already in place.
The key point is the Interstates are designed for vehicles to run at constant speeds (if you didn't have to refuel, you could drive from L.A. to Miami and not hit a traffic light), which is ideal for optimum fuel efficiency. We know we can easily improve fuel efficiency using existing technologies, and automakers are working on near-future technologies that'll allow more cars to use the same amount of road space more efficiently (I urge you to read Kim Reynolds' excellent piece on the recent DARPA Challenge).
Our Chevy Malibu averaged 22 to 23 mpg, but there were two of us in it all the time, so our real efficiency was more like 44 to 46 people mpg (that is, the distance traveled on a gallon of fuel, multiplied by the number of people on board). Had we been carrying four people, we would've been running at 88 to 92 people mpg. Now, just consider if we'd had a diesel under the hood. My eight months' experience with the 3.0-liter inline-six turbodiesel BMW 730d back in Britain showed up to 35 mpg at freeway speeds was easily achievable. With four passengers, that's 140 people mpg.
By way of comparison, the latest-generation passenger jets return somewhere between 65 and 100 people mpg. Trains are said to be much more efficient (I've seen numbers that suggest north of 400 people mpg on a fully loaded train). But a rail network also is expensive, inflexible, and inefficient if it's not used at capacity.
An efficient national transport system? It's already there. We just have to learn to use it better. Thanks, Ike.