And although he emphasized the reduction of highway deaths and injuries, eliminating detours and traffic jams as justification, he was just as concerned about what might happen if the Russians dropped an atomic bomb on the United States. Our highway gridlock might spell our doom, Eisenhower thought. The final segment was finished in 1992 when a tunnel under a park opened between downtown Duluth and Lake Superior. In between times there was the usual wrangling associated with political projects. After all, before the interstates, highways had numerous intersections in cities, slowing traffic and encouraging people to stop and spend money.
Interstates limit opportunities to get on and off the road.
And there were fights about where the highways should go. In Kansas the turnpike already went from Kansas City to Lawrence, Topeka and Emporia and then on to Wichita and south to Oklahoma. The federal interstate plan didn't follow the same route. I-35 ended up following a more direct route to Emporia before linking with the turnpike. Elsewhere, Weingroff said, there were battles over which metropolitan areas the road would traverse.