The Unwritten Rules of the Road

The Transportation Act of 1956 was initiated by the Eisenhower administration.  While the first Highway Act came about in 1921, the 1956 Act established funding to sponsor a national interstate highway system for the primary purpose of managing mass evacuation out of our cities and towns in the event that the ‘Big One’ fell on these shores.  The focus also was on the rapid deployment and efficient movement of our ground forces in the event of a national emergency.  Referred to as the ‘Cold War’, the communist threat was at its height, but thankfully, no bomb has been dropped on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

A by-product of the 1956 Transportation Act was nationwide construction of thousands of miles of brand new Interstate highways beckoning the growing public to conquer, and awakening a sleepy industry called Tourism.  It also provided the vast majority of Americans with easier access to a new frontier that was previously unknown prior to WWII:  the suburbs.  Returning veterans from both WWII and the Korean Conflict, flush with mustering-out pay, encountered not only technologically advanced household products of every make, model and shape, but most assuredly, shiny, brand new automobiles in showrooms with gleaming chrome on every eye-catching model.  As success is all about preparation meeting opportunity, this was a match made in Heaven!  A booming economy coupled with newly paved highways initiated construction of new subdivisions, that needed the newly minted automobiles to bridge one to the other.  All this conspired to elicit the promise of prosperity at its penultimate around just about any corner.  Having ‘won’ two major wars in less than a decade, with our renewed sense of prosperity and the freedom to pursue the American Dream revitalized,  everyone was attempting to drive towards that Dream in a new car as fast as the law allowed.

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Contained within these pages is a definitive outlook on the realities of the  “Unwritten Rules of the Road”.  The operative term, and title, in the new millennium on both the East and West coasts is  TRAFFIC NEGOTIATION (TN).  There now exists a new breed of folks on today’s highways, byways, and interstates known as Traffic Negotiators (TN’s).  ‘Driving’, as this nation may have once called it, has been displaced like home owners in the path of a new Interstate:  it no longer lives here anymore.  Like the decade of the 50’s, those days are over. 

As the number of vehicles in the United States continues to climb at record rates, a few blatant facts surface.  In the year 2000, the U. S. Department of Transportation figures revealed that there were more than 200,000,000 vehicles in America.  In the same year, the U. S. Census Bureau reported some 280,000,000 people living in the United States and its territories.  The vast majority of both these figures, at an almost 1 to 1 ratio no less, are concentrated on our nation’s coasts, with the East beating the West by a few million here and there.  Hence, it’s no small wonder that the three worst areas for traffic congestion in the continental United States are Los Angeles, CA, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, CA (San Francisco is now in 2^nd place).

To address the very real issue of getting from point A to point B in the midst of these findings, my staff and I will attempt to provide some insight into the wonders of the road, using our Nation’s Capital, commonly referred to as the Capital Beltway, I-495 (herein abbreviated as CB-495) as a rather unique example.  If you stay tuned and stay focused, you may take away some new techniques and strategies applicable to your own locality.