To see the dream, you could visit General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. As visitors glided through a scale-model world, a recorded voice murmured compelling promises in their ears. By 1960, it said, fourteen-lane expressways would carry traffic “at designated speeds of fifty, seventy-five, and one hundred miles an hour.” The cars would enter and leave at high speed via sleek interchanges. “One marvels at the complete accord of this man-made highway with the breathtaking scenic beauty of its route,” the voice proclaimed. Futurama quickly became the fair’s most popular attraction.

Such highways hardly seem far-fetched today—even if the speed limit was set too high—but the reality in 1939, and for a number of years thereafter, was worlds different. It could be seen along a stretch of U.S. 1 between Baltimore and Washington. There the road was a four-lane highway, built as recently as 1930. Even though widespread use of turn signals was still years in the future, not only was the road undivided but cars were allowed to make left turns across traffic along the route’s entire length. This deficiency reflected the demands of local merchants, who had insisted that a center barrier and a ban on left turns would cut their business in half. The result, through the years, was a large number of collisions.

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