By David Lagesse
Sometime next year, crews in a giant tunnel under downtown Boston will paint stripes on a 10-lane roadway--a finishing touch for two mammoth projects. One is the Big Dig, a controversial and costly effort to replace downtown Boston's elevated freeways with a complex of tunnels. The other, 47 years in the making, is so familiar that the paving of its last few miles could pass unnoticed: the interstate highway system. The world's largest public-works project has left us with 47,000 miles of remarkably uniform roads that have reshaped the American landscape and way of life. They have encouraged mobility, spawned new suburbs and commercial corridors, and consummated our romance with the automobile.

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They've also left a legacy of divided cities, environmental damage, and ever worsening traffic jams. In tying together a far-flung America, the interstates spurred bitter controversy that the system's designers didn't anticipate and struggled to understand when it erupted. "These guys were a bunch of civil engineers," says Tom Lewis, a historian and author of Divided Highways. "Suddenly, an act of Congress turned them into social engineers with tremendous power."

No single man wielded more power than Frank Turner, a quiet, unassuming technocrat who guided most of the design and construction of the interstates as the nation's chief roads engineer. Many travelers know to thank President Dwight D. Eisenhower, so impressed with the efficiency of Germany's autobahns, for giving life to the interstates with a 1956 law to fund them. It was Turner and a small group of engineers, nameless except to one another, who decided where to lay the concrete, directing a $130 billion project with remarkably little graft or political meddling.

Handshakes. The federal government paid 90 percent of the cost, but it was the states that actually planned and built the interstates under Turner's watchful eye. He didn't persuade with charisma. "His speeches were pretty bad--an engineer's tome," says Kevin Heanue, a manager at Turner's agency. Instead, he collaborated with small groups of state officials--a tight community of white men who decided matters with handshakes, sometimes after Christian prayers.

Such was the case with Interstate 395, a mass of concrete running southwest from Washington, D.C. It was planned around 1960 after the Virginia highway commissioner proposed widening a smaller highway to eight lanes. Turner simply said, "I think that's a good idea," according to an account published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation officials. "And right there, in a matter of minutes, we made a very major--and correct--decision," Turner later recalled.

Safety and efficiency were the guiding principles, says Frank Griggs, a transportation engineer who also worked on the New York State Thruway. "The engineers were trained in getting people from point A to point B in the cheapest, fastest, and safest manner." Cheap often meant through wetlands, only later recognized as valuable, or through slums, bulldozed before residents could organize. "We didn't realize that poor people might not want to move--even if we thought it was for their own good," Griggs says.

Backfiring. Condemnation notices descended on dozens of American inner cities. By the 1970s a "freeway revolt" had broken out. Activists in Washington, D.C., famously used the slogan "White men's roads through black men's homes" to stop several proposed highways. Similar campaigns succeeded in New Orleans, Boston, and San Francisco. And it wasn't always hardscrabble neighborhoods that rose up. In Memphis, Interstate 40 would have thrust through Midtown, a picturesque enclave of older homes. Activists stopped the road in a fight that wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Where urban freeways did proceed, they sliced cities into isolated sections, and their on and off ramps created traffic jams on side streets, says transportation expert Jonathan Gifford at George Mason University. At the same time, the roads gave Americans more freedom about where to live and work. Suburbs spread into once rural landscapes, and "edge cities" of offices and stores clustered around these new rivers of concrete, while the decline of cities accelerated.

By 1969, Turner had risen from chief engineer to federal highways administrator, and more projects began allowing for environmental and social concerns, for example by elevating highways over swamps or trenching them in cities to lessen noise. But Turner always defended highways, saying of traffic and sprawling suburbs: "If this was the choice of the American people, what is wrong with that?"

By the time he retired in 1972, most of the battles were over. He died in 1999 at 90, with only a few of the original miles authorized by Congress not built. Turner may not have anticipated the effects of his interstates, but the system he left behind looks astonishingly like the original plan. Says coworker Heanue: "Turner wasn't flashy, but he was incredibly persistent."