Since then, the figure has doubled to 24 million miles of paved roads. To some extent, the nation's highway network has boosted the nation's economy and improved the standard of living. Good roads also enable people to go places and do things they otherwise might not experience. Take a day's drive to Myrtle Beach, S.C., for example, and you won't be alone on the highway.
Roads have negative impacts, too.
Several years ago, I was driving a Northern journalist from Virginia Beach to the airport in Norfolk when he glanced out the window past a thin stand of pines and to the commercial clutter at an interchange. Look, he said, through the trees, you can see New Jersey. In Country of Exiles, Leach points out that along nearly every interstate, there now appears a strip mall, another batch of warehouse retailers, or another sunburst of merchandising. In 1970, about 13,000 shopping malls existed in the United States, nearly all built after 1955. By 1997, there were nearly 43,000 shopping malls 5,500 of them designed as large regional malls.