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Perpetual Rest

The interstate system was created in 1956 as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and everything about it is perfectly uniform and federally mandated, right down to the width of the dotted white line. Rest areas, however, have been the holdout of states’ rights, most of them designed in a way that’s consistent throughout a state and different from those in the commonwealth next door. Codified in federal jargon as “safety rest areas,” they grew out of the fear that as millions of us took to the road cross-country for the first time, we’d need regular resting outposts to keep us from barreling into each other.

That’s from an excellent piece over at Good, the sort of story after my own heart — the social and design history of a curious piece of vernacular architecture (the highway rest stop) one that now seems in decline.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Etc., Roads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact
Jenna Meulemans at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

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For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

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