Before Highways: How Americans Actually Crossed the Country

Описание: .Before highways, how did people actually drive across America? In 1903, it took 63 days, a $50 bet, and a bulldog in goggles. This is the hidden money history of the American road, and why you're still paying for it every time you buy gas.

In 1903, Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson became the first person to drive a car across the United States, at a time when only about 7% of America's roads had any surface at all. So how did the country go from muddy wagon ruts to nearly 50,000 miles of interstate highway? The textbook answer is "cars came along and the government built roads." The real answer is a 50-year fight over one question: who pays?

In this video, we follow the money from unpaid farm labor and the bicycle-driven Good Roads Movement, to Carl Fisher's privately funded Lincoln Highway, the pay-to-play "auto trails" of the 1920s, the birth of Route 66, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System. We also look at why Henry Ford refused to pay a cent for America's first coast-to-coast highway, and how the gas tax and the Highway Trust Fund proved him right.

This channel follows the money behind the systems you use every day: the roads, the dollar, the taxes, the mortgage. We trace each one back to the people who built it and the people who paid for it.

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