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As a transportation construction professional you know the enormous value of the work you do. Here’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to share your pride with family, employees, customers, friends and your community. The American Road & Transportation Builders Association has commissioned a unique hardcover book to tell our industry’s story…as it has never been told before.

Are We There Yet? Building America’s Transportation Infrastructure Network explores the many positive aspects that transportation infrastructure has had on the American culture, economy and quality of life. It is the story of America over the past century and it’s emergence as the most mobile nation in the world. From tourism to national emergencies, our infrastructure is the best.

Book Reviews

Reviewed by Paul Sonnenburg

Among Americans' more appealing cultural habits is our delight in celebrating milestones, from our kids' birthdays to the Fourth of July. In addition to the simple delight of appreciating important events with one another, these occasions provide touchstone opportunities to reflect on our accomplishments as individuals, as communities, as a nation. Commemorating its own centennial this year, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) made certain that such reflection can be both serious and pleasurable with publication of John Yow's "Are We There Yet," an informal history of the nation's transportation building enterprise in the last 100 years.

Among industry history books, the best can be surprisingly rewarding for general readers and specialists alike, revealing fresh perspectives and insights not only about their primary subjects but about our national experience and character as well. Perspective and synthesis abound in this singularly American story, beginning with Yow's controlling insight that the nation's vast and sophisticated infrastructure of modern highways, roads, bridges, airports, and harbors is as much a product of ideas and imagination as it is of concrete, asphalt, and steel. NASA's dramatic photos from space reveal the continent-spanning web of roads that seamlessly links our every farm, factory, hamlet, and metropolis, but only a skillful narrator can reveal the invisible but no less vital web of imagination, economics, politics, education, technology, and even art that are the true substance of the visible network. To say nothing of character, courage, and vision.

Although from colonial days the business of moving people and goods would influence every aspect of the emergent American society, only with the arrival of the 20th century would the idea of a national interstate highway network emerge, in part through the advocacy of visionary Horatio S. Earle. In 1902, Earle formed the American Road Makers, known today as ARTBA, to push for federal legislation to create a "National Capital Connecting Government Highway System." Although that system would not fully emerge until mid-century, the idea's time had clearly come. Key players in the young nation's increasingly competent political structure - elected officials, legislators, industrialists, advocates of every stripe - were learning how to manage genuinely national priorities. Advances in engineering and technology were accelerating explosively, and modern business methods were spawning great corporations and other devices of wealth and power: expanding means of implementing grand ideas only awaited commensurate challenges.

Yow sensibly arranges the threads of his story in dedicated chapters - the public/private collaboration essential to the boggling financial and engineering challenge of forging a transcontinental highway system, the emergence of a truly national economy first made possible by the railroads, the recreational and cultural opportunities accessible for millions of Americans with the arrival of the affordable automobile (Henry Ford's first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1913) and roads to drive them on, the role of good roads and highways in times of war and natural disaster, the steady improvement of the clever machines used to build and maintain roads. But the great themes linking these elements are simultaneously institutional and deeply human and some of the book's best moments emerge in Yow's vignettes of the people who shaped America's transportation network.

We meet an engaging cast, men who not only dreamed and built grandly, but whose ideas and conduct deeply influenced aspects of the nation's life far beyond their chosen career paths. Here, sampling the long list, are Carl Fisher who founded Prest-O-Lite and in 1912 unveiled a grand design for "the straightest feasible road from Times Square to San Francisco's Lincoln Park;" Logan Walter Page, long-time director of the Office of Public Roads, a scientifically trained civil servant who brought high standards of technical expertise to the highway movement; civil engineer Frank Turner, whose immensely productive 43-year career with the federal Bureau of Public Roads earned from his many admirers the designation "patron saint of Interstate highway development;" and standing astride New York for most of four decades, looms larger-than-life Robert Moses, whom biographer Robert Caro calls "unquestionably America's most prolific physical creator," the man who built nearly every major road in and around New York City, including seven major bridges linking the boroughs that make up the metropolitan area.

Typically, these were men of vision who saw themselves at the service of the public interest. Many reflected the attitudes of practical determination typical of professional engineers; they saw the ability of research to solve problems and viewed theirs as a high cause. But they came from diverse backgrounds and career paths, too: Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower play pivotal roles in Yow's account, men whose early hands-on experience with road making would shape their subsequent influential commitment to a truly national system. Entrepreneurs and inventors were always crucial team members, among them Robert LeTourneau, whose contributions included the first all-welded scraper with electric motors that tilted a massive steel bowl loading and unloading; and Harvey Firestone, whose pneumatic tire design for off-road equipment significantly improved the size, capacity, and power of earthmoving and construction machinery.

While the building of America's highway system was driven by irresistible historic forces of economics and politics, episodes of real danger and great daring were practically commonplace. And Yow provides enough examples to please even readers partial to adventure novels. We revisit the San Francisco earthquakes of 1906 and 1989 and the World Trade Center just last year to watch dedicated road construction crews accomplish hugely difficult rescue and rebuilding tasks with astonishing skill and speed. We journey deep below New York's Hudson and East Rivers to share the caisson workers' deadly dangers while excavating the city's Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the pier footings for Washington Roebling's mighty Brooklyn Bridge. We watch in amazement as U.S. Army engineers labor in unimaginably tough conditions to hew the Alaska Highway from forbidding wilderness in time to help end World War II.

The story is not all drama, of course, and we smile ruefully as the Burma Shave signs speed by, Howard Johnson erects his distinctive orange roofs along the new turnpikes, and America's countryside assumes a certain universal sameness beneath a forest of Holiday Inns and Golden Arches.

In the book's closing chapters, Yow compellingly sketches some of the complexities that characterize the transportation building industry's future, challenges inextricable from those of the nation at large. Even as futurists foresee superbly productive road making machinery remote-controlled entirely by computer and tracked by global positioning systems with no operators on board, knowledgeable observers of the national political scene anticipate a sustained struggle in local government and in the U.S. Congress to reconcile the conflicting values and priorities inherent in continued population growth, urban congestion, and environmental concerns.

Fittingly for a commemorative book, "Are We There Yet" is handsomely produced. The picture researchers have assembled an exceptional array of strong images always historically cogent and often striking, and the book's design is bold and inviting. Readers of a strict constructionist mind may take exception to Yow's occasional deployment of the views of earlier historians as if they applied without reservation to 21st-century realities. When, for instance, that savvy historian of U.S. automotive history, John Rae, wrote in 1970 extolling the merits of auto access to National Parks, he cannot possibly have imagined the smog-choked gridlock of the Yosemite Valley floor thirty years later. By quoting those remarks as current, Yow effectively misrepresents Rae's views. But these reservations are easily accommodated, and do not compromise a book that not only accomplishes its memorial and historical purposes commendably but is certain to bring real pleasure to any reader interested in an epochal American success story.

Paul Sonnenburg

Want to read some excerpts? Visit the ARTBA 100th Anniversary web page at www.artba.org!