[mellow music]
- [Henry] Do you remember
when driving cross country required a shovel and axe?
- Any potential driver should have been suspicious
about the claims of great luxury.
- You can get lost in a sandstorm.
On a snowy mountain pass, you can go right off the road
because there are no guardrails.
- Or when the open road had you seeing things?
- Highway hypnosis means that you're completely awake,
but your brain has checked out.
- All of these incidents create sort of a panic.
It comes to be called a new and deadly killer.
- Or when the right of way was determined
by hand-to-hand combat.
- They would have some poor sucker out there.
You go, you stop, you go. Nobody's paying attention.
- Which also means a bunch of people start fighting
in the streets.
- These are the things we used to do for fun, for money,
or maybe out of boredom that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous? Certainly.
Deadly? Occasionally.
But boy, wasn't it exciting?
[dramatic music]
- Remember when the open road felt like freedom,
a full tank of gas, a fold out map
and miles of highway stretching toward the horizon
and no road captured that spirit better than Route 66.
But as millions of Americans would soon discover,
getting your kicks came with more than a few bumps.
- In the early 20th century,
if you wanted to go from Chicago to Los Angeles,
you better have several months of free time
because it is a long journey and also a really slow one.
It's mostly rough, unpaved roads.
The maximum speed is about 20 miles an hour.
And if you break down, you're often breaking down,
literally in the middle of nowhere.
- [Henry] But much of that changes in the 1920s
when a new highway is established,
one that stretches from Chicago all the way to Los Angeles
and they call it Route 66.
- This roadway really becomes the symbol
of freedom and adventure
and this notion that you can have the life
that you want out west, you just got to get on this road
and go find it.
- [Edward] At first, it's a patchwork
of dirt roads stitched together.
So if you look at a map, it seems a bit wild
with all the twists and turns scattered throughout,
but hundreds of thousands of people
in the 1930s begin driving on it
as part of a great westward migration.
- At this time, Route 66 is going through a lot of farmland,
so it wasn't unheard of to be stopped
because of a herd of cattle that are just crossing the road.
- [Henry] Eventually it becomes
the first fully paved highway in America.
- By 1938, so many people have driven Route 66
that they've begun to call it The Mother Road.
- [Rutledge] You also have the birth of the roadside
attraction, like the world's biggest rocking chair
or the world's biggest ketchup bottle.
Each one of those was designed
to grab some of those tourism dollars.
- [Henry] By 1955, over a million cars are traveling
along Route 66 every year and that's a problem.
- The road is basically unchanged
from when it was first laid.
It's this really narrow road, no lane dividers, no shoulder,
and this is America's most trafficked tourist roadway.
- [Rutledge] And there's no rules about who can be
on the road,
so that means cars, trucks, 18 wheelers, even tractors.
All the cars are sharing this nine-foot wide lane,
which is smaller than some grocery store aisles today.
Everybody's just using it to get to where they need to go,
but that's what makes it so intense and so dangerous.
- [Negin] There are no merging lanes at this time.
So to get onto Route 66,
you're essentially making a hard right, flooring it,
and then hoping that no one comes and hits you from behind.
- [Edward] So just getting
onto this busy highway is already a recipe for disaster.
- [Adam] It bears noting that at this time,
most states don't have a speed limit.
And even if a state has a speed limit,
there's no fancy reflective signs
or any kind of lights along the highway.
No, no, no, no, no.
If you're lucky, there is a hand-painted or wooden sign
that you can't even see at night.
- [Rutledge] Keep in mind, the cars back then were these
gigantic hunks
of steel and safety wasn't even a consideration.
Hundreds of people are dying from all these crazy accidents.
You've got the Devil's Elbow, Dead Man's Alley,
Dead Man's Curve.
- [Henry] In 1953, New Mexico alone sees 110 fatalities
on Route 66.
- [Natalia] Thanks to all this,
Route 66 gets a new nickname, Bloody 66.
- [Adam] Finally, the federal government steps in
to create the modern interstate
with the 1956 Federal Highway Act.
However, there is a massive downside.
Less traffic means that the businesses all along Route 66
begin to close because quite simply,
they can't afford to stay open.
- [Edward] Route 66 proves to be a dramatic milestone
for our growing country.
We owe a lot of gratitude to these forgotten roads
that pave the way for what we now take for granted.
- As the nation's highways improved,
driving became faster, smoother, and more predictable,
which turned out to be a problem on its own.
- When the US starts laying tens of thousands of miles
of these new super highways,
they're a complete game changer.
Now people are flying down these roads
at 60, 70 miles an hour
and they're cutting down hours from their daily commutes.
- But as drivers start to take advantage
of these smooth new highways,
suddenly there's a new phenomenon
and we begin to hear these unusual reports from drivers
that drive long distances, especially at night.
- [Kavitha] In 1958, a driver is going through Illinois
when he sees a tiger and slams on the brakes.
- Around the same time,
there's a man driving in rural Georgia
when he says he sees a big colonial mansion
in the middle of the road
and he swerves in order to avoid running into it.
- There's a guy in Pittsburgh who is convinced
that he ran over some guy in the middle of the road.
He stops, he calls the cops.
They look for this body and they can't find it.
- [Henry] But it turns out these incidents aren't real.
They are hallucinations
and they are occurring all over the country.
The new smooth super highways are creating a new phenomenon
that is labeled highway hypnosis.
- [Hakeem] Highway hypnosis means that you're completely
awake, your eyes are wide open, but your brain has checked out.
- Researchers find out
that new highways are literally too easy to drive on
and that lulls people into sort of a trance-like state.
- [Hakeem] Before this, car accidents were caused
by multiple car collisions
or there's a major problem with the road.
- [Lance] Now a new category is growing faster than any other
and that is the one car collision
when a lone driver just spins off the road
or runs into a pole or a bridge for no apparent reason.
- In 1956, newspapers report
that single car accidents are responsible
for 40% of all traffic fatalities.
- [Lance] All of these incidents create sort of a panic.
It comes to be called a new and deadly killer.
Chevy releases a safety film on the subject.
- [Presenter] The steady pace
of monotonous high speed driving
on a highway can lull the driver's eyes
and mind off the road.
- [Henry] To combat highway hypnosis, drivers get a lot
of practical advice.
- [Negin] The government starts suggesting all of these kind
of crazy things like take your right shoe off,
put your hand out the window, listen to music,
or sit on an uncomfortable board.
They're just these strange hacks.
- [Presenter 2] An ACE driver. Alert, courteous, educated.
- The Navy recommends running the windshield wipers
even in dry weather just to have the distraction.
- [Negin] One safety engineer actually recommends
taking your mother-in-law with you
because she'll probably keep you up
through various annoyances.
- [Kavitha] None of these weird remedies actually fix the
problem and it soon becomes clear that a super smooth road
with too little stimulation can be a danger in itself.
- So the result is a range of fixes
that we would recognize today, but also we take for granted.
Things like reflective paint on the roads
and on the road signs, raised barriers between lanes.
- There's a whole effort to make the roads less straight
so they add curves to the highway
that force the driver to pay attention and stay awake
even if that makes the route less direct.
- [Hakeem] But the biggest change comes in 1955
on the Garden State Parkway.
They installed the first singing shoulders.
That's that edge of the highway where it's all serrated
and if you drift over there,
then it makes a loud noise and that'll awaken you
and today we call these rumble strips.
- Ah, the rumble strip.
The highway's way of saying,
"Hey, wake up before things get interesting."
- In the 1970s, with their big rigs, convoys
and CB radios, truckers ruled the road
but when it came to following the rules of the road,
let's just say it was a different time.
- For the first half of the 20th century,
if you wanted to move large amounts
of cargo around the country, your best option is a train.
- This all changed in the 1950s
as people began moving from the cities to the suburbs.
The Federal-Aid Highway Act supercharges
interstate highway construction.
Trucks get bigger and more powerful,
capable of carrying everything from your produce
to the government's nuclear weapons.
- There was a mystique to the trucker back then.
Big rigs were exotic, beautiful, powerful,
and as a kid interested in big machines,
I was just swept directly into it.
- [Henry] By 1972, nearly a million big rigs are
on the highways.
It's a $15 billion industry.
And many of the truckers are independent contractors
and they're all competing for a bigger slice of the pie.
And the rules, they're largely non-existent.
- In a lot of states in the '70s,
in the heyday of trucking, you didn't need
to get a special license.
You just needed a driver's license
and to be of a certain age.
Then they gave you the keys to a tractor trailer
and the same guy who learned to drive on like a
Dodge Dart was suddenly barreling down the highway
in something half the size of a city block.
- [Henry] With little restriction,
legions of truckers hit the road
but the new administration
imposes new obstacles to overcome
including lowering the speed limit to 55 miles per hour.
- [Don] Truckers decide the answer is not to reduce
their speed,
but rather to keep driving fast and avoid getting caught.
- [Austin] One thing working in their favor,
in the 1970s, states don't share driving records.
This means truckers take advantage of the system
by getting different licenses in different states.
If they're pulled over, they just take out the one
with the fewest violations.
- [Don] They embrace something
that was originally made for farmers.
It's called Citizens Band radios or CBs.
- [Brian] CB radios started popping up in these trucks
to warn each other where the cops were.
So you had a massive surveillance system on the cops
and then a massive deception
with all these multiple driver's licenses.
But hey, truckers gotta truck.
- [Austin] The big rig truckers become heroes.
Think of Smokey and the Bandit, a number one film.
Think of C.W. McCall's Convoy.
Kids are dressing like them.
They're the coolest guys on the highway.
Everyone wants to be a trucker.
- [Henry] But the brakes are about to be put
on all the fun.
- [Natalia] There's a reason that today truckers are subject
to so many more regulations.
In truck crashes, the casualty count tends
to be much, much higher.
- [Don] Truckers in the '70s had brutal deadlines,
which often resulted in taking pep pills
to stay awake for long journeys.
That, along with minimal safety regulations,
made the highways extremely dangerous.
- [Natalia] If the truck is carrying some kind of dangerous
substance, these crashes can be lethal.
In 1976, there's this tragic truck crash.
Ammonia spills everywhere.
It kills six people and injures nearly 180.
- [Henry] In 1979, there are over 6,000 fatal crashes
involving big trucks.
The deadliest year on record.
And the era of no-rules trucking comes to a screeching halt.
- [Austin] By 1986, the Commercial Motor Safety Act
standardizes the rules
for getting a commercial driver's license
across the states
but that hated 55 mile an hour speed limit,
that stays around till 1995.
- [Brian] In the era that I grew up,
truckers had this almost mythological feeling to them.
Before all these rules come in to be like,
"hey, you can't just pluck some dude off the street
and put him behind the seat of a rolling tank
and set him loose on society."
- Of course, truckers weren't the only ones
pushing the limits.
There was one driver in particular
whose need for speed inspired a road race
so extreme it became the stuff of legend.
- [Jason] Brock Yates loves cars, he's an amateur racer.
He's a writer for Car and Driver Magazine.
And for him, driving fast is the American dream.
- In 1971, Yates is concerned
that we've got so many new safety regulations and rules
that it's taking the fun out of driving
and so he comes up with a really interesting idea
to protest that.
- [Jason] The idea is a race across America.
You start in New York, you end in Los Angeles.
Get there as fast as you can
and do it by any means necessary.
- He names the competition after a legendary racer
from the early 1900s, Erwin Cannon Ball Baker,
famous for driving cross country 143 times.
- It's known as the Cannonball Run.
- On November 15th, 1971, 23 competitors
in eight vehicles gather to start the 2,800 mile race
at a Manhattan garage called the Red Ball Garage.
- They take off just after midnight and whoever gets
to Redondo Beach, California, the fastest wins.
- [Jason] During the race, drivers are on the road all day
and all night.
They are averaging 100 miles per hour,
sometimes topping out at 175 miles per hour.
- [Rutledge] On a public road
that someone else is doing 55 miles an hour, that's insane.
- [Nicole] To avoid stopping for gas,
competitors are carrying hundreds
of gallons of fuel with them.
You literally are going to explode
if a crash were to happen.
- Despite the insanity of this race,
the police are not all that interested in stopping it.
- [Edward] Laws differ from state to state.
And at this time, communication
between different state police forces is sorely lacking.
- [Rutledge] Surprisingly, the cops only give out 10 tickets.
In fact, when one of the competitors
reaches the finish line in LA,
they actually got a police escort
with a cop car and a motorcycle.
- [Nicole] After 35 hours, 54 minutes,
the winner crosses the finish line and it's Yates.
This is by far the fastest anyone has ever driven
across country at this time.
- [Henry] The races run four more times in the 70s
with racers continuing to outmaneuver each other,
but their risks are shared with everyone on the road.
- [Lance] Dangers do start to show themselves.
Cars are not really meant to be driven 100 miles an hour
for hours and hours at a time.
- [Nicole] Lots of things go wrong during the race.
I mean, there's engines blowing,
there's transmissions overheating, tires being blown.
- [Jason] Today, mainstream media reports would likely frame
this reckless activity in a negative manner,
but then the Cannonball Run sort of gets a glowing writeup.
Car and Driver Magazine puts a headline right on its cover
and says these men are wanted
for breaking the dumbest law since Prohibition.
And just as a reminder,
Brock Yates is not only a writer for Car and Driver,
but he's an editor.
- [Henry] But with more eyes on them,
drivers have to rely on their wits to stay on the road.
- [Kavitha] Eventually, cops start cracking down,
so drivers stoop to ridiculous lengths
to keep the race going.
- [Rutledge] Yates' team dresses up their van to look like an
ambulance so they could get through traffic faster.
Another crew dresses like Catholic priests.
There's even a team with a cooler
that's loaded with pig's eyes on ice
and it says "Rush to Eye Bank" on there.
I mean, that's clever, I feel like that would have to work.
- [Edward] When one team gets pulled over,
they actually show fake permits
that say they're part of an official highway speed study.
It's even rumored
that one of the teams turns off its headlights
and uses night vision to evade cops during the night.
There are no major accidents
or fatalities during any of the races, so I guess it worked.
- I love a good road trip.
I just prefer arriving without setting any records.
- Have you ever been stopped at a traffic light so long
that you started to wonder, "hey, is that thing stuck?"
Well, in the early days of automobiles,
drivers didn't have that problem
because there weren't any traffic lights.
- [Rutledge] In 1908, the Model T really changes the face
of transportation in this country.
Suddenly everyone's got cars,
but there is a little bit of an issue.
- The streets are already pretty crowded.
They're crowded with other people,
with street cars, with horses.
- [Rutledge] Most of them don't really know
what to do at an intersection.
No one really knows when to go,
which also means a bunch of people start fighting
in the streets.
- [Negin] It was chaos. Cities realize it can't go on
like this.
And their first solution is an umbrella
that said on one side, stop and on the other side, go.
If it's raining,
that poor guy, he has a little coverage from the rain.
- [Brian] Yeah, umbrellas that had stop and go printed on it
and they would have some poor sucker out there
twisting the umbrella each way
to let you go, you stop, you go.
The problem is not everybody can read.
Then if it was dark out at night,
can you even see the umbrella?
The system broke down almost immediately.
- [Austin] In 1914, there was a breakthrough.
Cleveland inventor James Hoge
creates the world's first electric traffic light.
It's a system of four pairs
of red and green lights placed on a post.
- This is a huge leap forward.
Drivers can actually see these lights. They're high.
It allows people to do a lot more night driving
and they can drive faster
because they have the reliance of these traffic lights.
- [Negin] However, there's no transition light.
It's just stop and go.
So you have no warning.
That creates a lot of accidents.
- [Rutledge] If you're doing 30 miles an hour
in your Model T, just cooking up to it
and it changes from go to stop, you're going
to hit something.
You're not going to make the light.
- [Henry] By 1920, electric lights are the norm
on city blocks,
but there are still plenty of kinks to work out.
- In really busy areas like Midtown Manhattan,
three story structures are built
in the middle of the intersection
with the traffic lights atop.
- [Negin] The early traffic lights are on posts
that are sort of smack dab in the middle of the street,
which is great because it's like in your eye line,
you can't miss it
but also you like physically can't miss it.
You're like crashing into it a lot, the placement is poor.
- [Brian] People are clipping this thing,
people driving, nobody's paying attention,
who's fighting with his wife.
Boom, right into the stupid thing.
And these things are going down like trees.
It's like timber down, down, down.
- [Austin] The timing of these light changes
are inconsistent and unpredictable.
They're triggered by an operator.
If the guy doing it snoozes off
or gets distracted, you don't know
how long you're going to be waiting at said light.
- [Negin] Eventually people get annoyed
and so they start running lights
and you know, there's some more chaos.
- [Henry] Even when lights go automatic,
the problems aren't slowing down.
Road deaths keep climbing.
And in 1935,
the federal government standardizes traffic lights.
- [Austin] The Feds issue
The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices
for Streets and Highways.
It standardizes the traffic signal language
across the country.
Red on top for stop, yellow in the middle for caution,
green on bottom for go.
That is with one exception.
A neighborhood of Syracuse, New York populated
by Irish immigrants sees a red above a green
as a symbol of British dominance
then they begin smashing the red light.
- [Brian] "You put England over Ireland?
We will never obey these laws ever."
You got to appreciate that sort of moxie.
So what does the government do?
They're like, "All right, for the Irish people's sake,
we're going to swap it."
- Green is still above red
in a certain neighborhood in Syracuse.
- Of course, keeping cars moving was only part
of the challenge.
Sooner or later, all drivers had to stop for gas.
And there was a time
when getting gas was less routine errand
and more Russian Roulette.
- [Don] In 1859, the American petroleum business is born
when crude oil is struck in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
Jump ahead 40 years to the start of the 20th century
and everything changes.
The ascent of the automobile
with its gas burning engine
suddenly makes gasoline a hot commodity.
Now the question becomes, how do you get gas into the car?
- In the beginning, fueling up is very DIY.
Fuel is kept in these big tanks at hardware stores
or at these depots at the edge of town.
You take your canister, fill that up
and you pour it in by hand.
- Back then, cars didn't have a fuel gauge in them
and what that led to was a lot of people ran out of gas.
You would never be able to tell
whether or not you're running on a full tank
or if you're about to be on foot.
- [Henry] By 1910, a more high-tech solution
becomes widespread, the gas pump.
- [Hakeem] The pumps have the gas stored underground
and the driver uses a crank
to move the gas up through a hose and into the car.
Compared to sloshing around jugs of gasoline,
these pumps are neat, tidy, and efficient.
- [Don] The gas pump is such a breakthrough
that cities begin putting them all over.
But American cities
in the 1910s and 20s are actually really bad places
for these things.
- [Hakeem] Initially, the pumps were placed roadside
right on the curb like a mailbox.
And so the driver would pull up to fill their tank.
Cars would pile up behind them.
The other drivers would have to swerve around.
It just creates a big mess.
- [Dan] And let's say a driver accidentally bumps
into the gas pump.
It's what happens after the gas leak
that you need to worry about.
- A few teaspoons of liquid gasoline becomes liters
of gasoline vapor and it's denser than air,
so there's a layer of gasoline vapor covering the ground.
- [Dan] And here's where things really go sideways.
American cities have lots and lots of sparks.
- [Don] There are streetcars everywhere raining little hails
of fire whenever they make a hard turn
and don't forget smoking.
- [Hakeem] All it takes is one spark from a backfiring car,
a cigarette, a streetcar,
and wooh, somebody's going to get crispy.
- [Dan] The early 20s are full of these ridiculously scary
stories of gas pump disasters like the pipe smoking trucker
who in 1925 accidentally tossed a lit match
into a puddle of gas.
His pump and three other pumps nearby exploded together
in a giant wall of flame.
- [Edward] So as a consequence of all this chaos,
New York takes on the problem
and in 1923, says you can't have a pump
on the side of the road.
You have to put it in a designated lot.
- [Don] Once gas pumps are forced into their own area,
it births a new kind of business, the gas station.
- [Martin] And now when you pop in to get some gas, you're going
to get a snack, a big fountain beverage,
and probably lotto tickets.
- Today, the only thing challenging
about filling up your tank is the cost.
- [Henry] Today, when there's road work,
we use reflective signs, flashing lights,
and bright orange cones to keep drivers and workers safe
but there was once a time
when road crews used something else to alert drivers,
and it was kind of a bomb.
- [Martin] In 1916, Woodrow Wilson signs a bill providing
$75 million for paving roads across the country.
This means that motorists are going
to encounter road construction
more than they have ever encountered it before.
And how do you alert motorists
to the presence of construction teams after dark?
- [Austin] At first, road crews improvise
from an unlikely source, citrus farmers.
Citrus farmers utilize these metal cans
with an open flame called smudge pots
to keep their groves warm at night.
The road workers take these and repurpose them
as roadway signaling devices.
- [Martin] They weren't ideal
and that's because all it takes is a little bit of rainfall
or maybe even a gusting wind
and the smudge pot will be blown out.
- [Austin] In 1929, a better smudge pot emerges in
Toledo, Ohio.
It's made by the Toledo Pressed Steel Company,
and it's called the Toledo Torch.
- [Adam] The design is a sphere that has a weighted bottom
so it can right itself if it ever gets tipped over
and it has the wick tucked inside so it's protected.
And most impressively, it can burn for about 48 hours.
- [Henry] Soon, smudge pots are lighting up detours, digs
and damp pavements across America.
They remain the standard
throughout the road building boom
of the 1950s, but they aren't foolproof.
- [Martin] The problem is that they burn at a thousand degrees
and the smoke contains toxins that are carcinogenic
and sometimes they're close to a playground of a school.
- [Adam] So imagine you're a kid,
you're hanging out with your friends,
and suddenly you come across something that looks like this.
- [Austin] This looks like something that would blow up
in a Looney Tunes' character's face,
which means it would be particularly compelling to steal
and play with, with your friends.
- It looks like a fun cartoon bomb.
- [Henry] The result is a series of incidents
that almost seem like cartoon chaos.
- In 1955, a kid throws a rock at a pot, hits it,
and it explodes flames everywhere.
- In 1958, a couple of kids decide
to roll one like a bowling ball
and it rolls toward one of the construction trucks
at the site, it gets lodged underneath the tire
and then sets the whole thing on fire.
- [Hakeem] In 1960, a truck in Arizona is carrying a load
of 40 of these pots when it suddenly bursts into flames.
Luckily, the driver thinks quickly
and drives directly to a fire station.
As these flare pot accidents continue to rack up,
the authorities begin to look for alternatives
and by the 1970s, they find it.
- [Martin] Eventually, construction sites settle on
non-hazardous and non-toxic ways
of alerting traffic to dangers on the road.
- Smudge pots were just one roadside hazard
of the last century.
Another was an iconic ad campaign
that was so captivating drivers just couldn't look away.
- [Adam] In 1925, there is a little shaving cream company
out of Minnesota
and they want to make a name for themselves,
in particular, a product they have called Burma-Shave.
- [Don] They want to advertise
so they put up billboards all along the side of the highway
to capitalize on the rise of the country's auto industry
but they need to stand out
from all the other billboards popping up
so they try a bold approach.
- [Natalia] The first step pops up on Minnesota highways
and they have these cute little rhymes like,
"My job is keeping faces clean
and nobody knows the stubble I've seen.
Burma-Shave."
- [Don] Each billboard is set about 100 feet apart
and each one has a single line of a joke.
So you got to read each billboard
and you got to read the very last one
if you want the whole joke plus the punchline.
So that's a lot of time with your eyes off the road.
- [Edward] Once you start reading one of these billboards,
it's almost impossible to not read to the end.
It's just human nature.
Our brains hate to leave a task unfinished.
So drivers become almost hypnotized,
locking their eyes on the side of the road
instead of in front of them.
- [Henry] By the late 1930s,
there are 42,000 Burma-Shave signs scattered
across more than 40 states.
- [Martin] Burma-Shave kind of owns the marketplace
at the time.
It's just ever present.
People mentioned it constantly
and there were even references to it in movies.
- [Edward] They even have a gag contest.
Rip a fender off your car, mail it in for a half pound jar.
So you might wreck your car,
but the consolation is you'll get a free jar of Burma-Shave.
- [Natalia] The thing about these advertisements is
they were almost too good.
Once you start reading, you can't stop.
It is like early days distracted driving.
- [Jason] In the 1930s, this is a very risky thing to do.
Roads are becoming more perilous.
Every time you come up onto these things,
you increase your chances of rear-ending a vehicle,
going off the road, going into oncoming traffic.
I mean, these things are creating hazards.
- [Henry] In 1937, the motor vehicle death rate
hits the highest year on record,
30 deaths per 100,000 Americans.
- So the executives at Burma-Shave feel like they have
to do something to address the growing dangers of the road,
but their solution is to keep doing exactly
what they've been doing
but now the signs are going to be safety themed.
- [Adam] "Don't take a curve at 60 per.
We'd hate to lose a customer.
Burma-Shave."
- [Edward] The signs are still distracting.
Only now you can read a helpful message about road safety
before smashing into the car in front of you.
- [Henry] Burma-Shave eventually veers away
from their iconic roadside signs,
but not for the reason you'd think.
- Eventually Burma-Shave loses its dominance,
not because of concerns about safety and their ad campaign
but because more and more ad money is going into TV
and into radio.
- [Jason] The fact that highways become faster
and faster makes it impossible
to read the jokes in the same way.
No one's going to slow down to read a joke anymore
because they got places to be.
- For years, we worried about distracting billboards
and then came the smartphone.
Some call that progress.
- Driving cross country has long been a rite of passage
and a chance to experience our nation's beauty up close
but for the first drivers who attempted the trip,
it was less about scenery, more about survival.
- [Lance] In 1913, some prominent industry leaders
are celebrating a brand new milestone.
They are opening the nation's first
coast to coast highway for cars.
- [Edward] The route runs 3,400 miles from Times Square
in New York City to San Francisco,
and it's known as the Lincoln Highway.
- [Lance] This is really a landmark moment for the country.
Previous to this,
the only way you could get across country was
to get on a slow and expensive train.
Now for the first time, you can get into your own vehicle
to drive across the country without having
to sit in a train car with dozens of strangers.
- [Henry] Traffic on the Lincoln Highway starts slow,
but it eventually surges to 20,000 cars per year.
- [Rutledge] Part of what's luring drivers is the ads are
saying, "Hey, this is the best way to travel.
If you want to see the coast, do it in the luxury
of your own vehicle."
- [Jason] There's also this idea
that taking the Lincoln Highway is a patriotic act.
Like America wants you to take the Lincoln Highway
and prove that we are ready for the 20th century of travel.
- [Henry] But when the motorists actually hit the road,
they find something very different
than the scenic joyride they were sold.
- [Natalia] What's sort of hilarious is that the first clue
that the Lincoln Highway may not be exactly
what it's marketed as is in the promotional guide itself.
There's a packing list of what to bring.
Any potential driver
of the Lincoln Highway should have been a little suspicious
about the claims of great luxury.
- [Rutledge] They say bring multiple days of provisions
for food and don't wear nice shoes.
I'm sorry, what kind of road is this?
So you want me to bring an axe?
I don't know what I'm going to dig up
or bury with this shovel, but also bring three days of food?
This does not sound great.
- [Edward] On a map, the Lincoln Highway looks amazing.
It's a nice thick line all the way from Times Square
all the way across the country to San Francisco.
In reality, the Lincoln Highway is nothing more than a bunch
of small roads that are sort of stitched together
in the imaginations of the highway builders
to make it a highway.
- [Henry] The Lincoln Highway
isn't actually a highway at all.
- [Martin] When it's introduced, less than half
of the Lincoln Highway is actually paved.
There are things that are left over from the 19th century
when Pioneers cross the American West trying
to get to California.
Old wagon trails that have been stitched together
and then labeled the Lincoln Highway.
- [Rutledge] Most of the travelers
that are taking a trip like this are kind
of your upper echelon.
You know, like they're fancy and they want some adventure.
What they don't realize is once they get west
of the Mississippi, the trip's going to turn a bit.
- [Lance] Every day is physically exhausting.
The slightest rain turns the entire road into mud.
The cars flood as you try to ford rivers.
The frame is broken or cracked
as you try to climb up rocky hills.
- [Jason] If you make it to the west, you can get lost
in a sandstorm.
On a snowy mountain pass, you can go right off the road
because there are no guardrails.
You are at the complete mercy of the elements.
- [Henry] In 1919, the Lincoln Highway Association
comes up with an idea to give the road's reputation a boost.
- [Martin] A publicity stunt is staged
in which an army convoy of 81 vehicles,
including 34 heavy trucks, will drive to California
on the Lincoln Highway.
The idea here is that
if the Lincoln Highway can sustain the weight
of a military convoy weighing 400 tons,
well, it can certainly handle the weight
of your family in a four-door sedan
as you journey to California.
- [Edward] It is not ready.
The US Army actually has a worse trip
than maybe anybody else.
They get stranded in quicksand in Nebraska.
They get stopped in a salt marsh in Utah.
All in all, there are 21 serious injuries,
including concussions and broken bones.
- [Martin] By the time that they finally limp
into San Francisco after 62 days on the road,
they look less like a triumphant military force
that's just completed this epic journey
than something that has just rolled off of a battlefield.
- [Edward] So if the Army can't handle it,
the family car doesn't have a prayer.
- [Henry] With all this exposure, more funding pours in
and by 1935, the entire route is paved.
- There is one silver lining which is that one of the people
that participated was a young officer
named Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And when he becomes president of the United States,
he will push for
and oversee the passage of the Interstate Highway Act,
which will build a massive modern highway system
from coast to coast.
- Next time you're on a long road trip,
just be glad you don't need an axe and a shovel.
- They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Turns out our roads were once paved
with something a bit more troubling.
- [Lance] In the early 1960s, American automotive culture
is getting very, very cool.
We become sort of the muscle car country.
They have much bigger engines.
They're much heavier and that's wreaking havoc
on roads and streets, many of which were laid decades before
with a much more primitive and fragile form of asphalt.
- Highway authorities are looking for a way
to make pavement stronger and more resilient
so that roads won't need to be paved as often.
And they hear about this miracle ingredient,
something that could prevent potholes
and make road repairs a thing of the past.
- [Hakeem] It's cheap, abundant,
and made of these super thin fibers
that are flexible and strong.
Mixing just a bit of this stuff
into the asphalt will make roads more stable
and crack resistant.
- [Dan] And one of the big selling points is how easy it is
to work into the existing process of making asphalt.
They don't need any special equipment at all.
- [Announcer] The addition to the asphalt mix calls
for little change in operations.
On the job, the mix requires no special handling.
- [Lance] Soon more than 150 highway authorities
across the United States and Canada start
to use this more resilient new road surface.
It's spread across cities, suburbs, and interstates.
- And for drivers, this is amazing.
Driving on these new improved roads,
no more potholes, that is awesome.
- [Henry] But this powerful ingredient is more
than it's cracked up to be.
- [Negin] So the material comes from this small town
in which it's mined just over the border
in Canada called Asbestos.
The town is called Asbestos, Canada
Many, many, many miles of American road are lined
with this toxic material, asbestos.
- [Dan] The thing that makes asbestos
so valuable to highway engineers,
its thin, flexible, incredibly strong fibers, turns out
to also make it super deadly when it's inhaled.
Those fibers can get stuck in your lungs and kill you.
- At first, there are no regulations
around working with asbestos.
You don't have to wear a mask.
You don't have to wear gloves.
No protection is needed whatsoever.
There's a reason why today
asbestos removal workers are wearing hazmat suits.
It's extremely dangerous.
- [Hakeem] It becomes clear in the 1970s
that working with asbestos is completely toxic
and these road workers across the United States
and Canada are bearing the brunt of the cost
and they're getting really sick.
- [J Mack] And it's not just the construction workers
that are getting affected by this.
Over time, wear and tear
of the roads will send these asbestos fibers into the air
that are then inhaled by pedestrians and by motorists.
- Driving itself is bad enough.
You're moving at high speeds. You can have collisions.
It's known to be dangerous,
but now the road itself is dangerous.
- [Dan] During the '70s and '80s,
the federal government tightens restrictions
around working with asbestos.
So it gets phased out of road construction altogether.
- [Negin] Also, the town of Asbestos, Quebec
ends up renaming itself to Val-des-Sources
and so far, no toxic chemicals have been associated
with the term Val-des-Sources.
- It's hard to believe
there was a time when asbestos wasn't just allowed
to be in our streets,
but celebrated for being in our streets.
In this 1960s promotional film, the narrator's asking
what probably seems like a thoughtful question at the time.
- [Announcer] What will our present techniques
look like 50 years from now?
- Today, we know the answer is totally insane.
- Looking back at life on the open road,
whether we were lining the highway
with flaming smudge pots,
racing across the country at breakneck speeds,
or drifting into a trance behind the wheel,
when we hit the gas, things didn't always run smoothly,
but that sense of freedom is
what made our hazardous history worth a few bumps
in the road.