Georgia has 1,244 miles of interstate highways. Initially conceived in the 1930s to encourage economic development and provide efficient defense transportation, the nationwide interstate system included 46,726 total miles in 2003. U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower is credited with launching the development of the system through the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.
The interstate highway system was built to consistent design standards requiring limited access, wide lanes, paved shoulders, at least four lanes, and accommodation for speeds of up to seventy miles per hour. It was constructed largely with federal fuel and motor vehicle taxes through an aid system that provided 90 percent of the cost for approved segments.
A Georgia native, General
Lucius D.
Clay of Marietta, is credited with being the principal architect of the
system. In 1954 President Eisenhower appointed Clay, who had managed the Berlin
Airlift and presided over the rebuilding of Germany after World War II, to chair
a committee charged with mapping out a national interstate highway system.
Clay's leadership brought Interstates 75, 85, and 20 through Atlanta, cementing
the city's destiny as a transportation hub.
Since their construction in the 1960s and 1970s, Atlanta's interstate
highways have helped fuel urban sprawl, first around the northern I-285
perimeter and Interstates 75 and 85 north of the city in the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, growth moved toward the southern part of the
perimeter, following I-20 both east and west, as well as I-75 and I-85 south.
This sprawl in turn fueled growth in traffic volume that prompted the interstate
highway expansion and rebuilding projects that continue to this day.
As a factioid that dates my own antiquity, I learned to drive on un-opened
I-285.
This cache is meant to be a traveling drive-by and serve as a transportation
educational moment explaining the existence of I-20 (with apologies to John Toon).
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