Proposed 1913 highway system separates cars and trucks

[Permalink]

Look closer: ā€œtrunkā€ not ā€œtruck.ā€ These proposals do not actually separate cars and trucks.

7 Likes

Iā€™m glad they didnā€™t keep that original plan for the route through Washington with the loop south from Spokane before it heads towards Seattle.

Adding another hundred miles to one of the most miserable drives in the US? No thanks. Hints of that plan exist in the real world today, but you donā€™t swing as far down as the map proposes.

Thereā€™s actually a lot of inefficiencies on that version that Iā€™m glad got smoothed out when the real interstates were built.

I came here to say the same thing. It seems like a tree analogy.

EDIT: Also the original ā€œmain lineā€ is really biased toward being accessible from the northern US.

Trunk. Jesus.

3 Likes

I like how North Dakota gets an interstate, but not Michigan. Maybe there were no cars in Detroit at that time.

1 Like

So the goal was to separate passengers from their luggageā€¦Of course now we have airlines for that. And of course these were more like US routes than interstatesā€¦Just getting one lane paved in each direction would have been a major accomplishment at the time.

Good catch. The Bell Companies used to call the big cables ā€œtrunks,ā€ but Iā€™m darned if I know the difference between trunk, main and link.

While weā€™re at it, Iā€™m pretty sure the mappers meant to reduce moral terpitude, not increase it.

We still have trunk roads here in the UK: major roads (including motorways) managed by the national Highways Agency, as opposed to ordinary ā€˜mainā€™ roads managed by county councils.

I think the US equivalent would be interstates vs. state-level highways/freeways.

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.