American Road

"The American highway system today is a vast, dense, functionally differentiated network consisting of one million miles of major roads and expressways that collect and distribute traffic from an additional three million miles of rural roads and city streets. In The American Road, Katherine Johnson offers a new explanation for the outsized dimensions of the American highway system that aims to reconcile and supersede the existing accounts, which attribute those dimensions to factors such as the distinctiveness of American culture, the Cold War, American industry, and federal highway engineers. This study develops a new theory by incorporating a level of government that most studies leave out: the sub-national states. It does so by tracing the origins of the highway system to a self-organized association of state highway officials who managed to forge and maintain consensus over the basic parameters of federal highway policy for the better part of the 20th century. Though many studies of American highway policy emphasize the partnership between the federal government and the states, none has problematized the magnitude and duration of that partnership relative to other types of administrative arrangement in the federal system. Using qualitative and statistical analysis, The American Road reconceptualizes the role of the federal highway bureaucracy from centralizing administrator to facilitator of the consensus decisions of state highway departments. Johnson's work sheds new light on how motor vehicles came to dominate the American landscape and how the highway system reveals the complex inner workings of the modern administrative state"--