Argumentative Essay: The Interstate Highway System

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” This quote by Saint Augustine shows how much more you can experience and learn by traveling and exploring. The reason this quote is included into this essay is because the Interstate Highway system made traveling or “reading your book” a lot faster and safer. The Highway System is fairly recent, being only 60 years old, but it has made a huge contribution towards how we travel and move across the country. Stretching for more than 74,600 km across the United States, the Interstate Highway System is constantly used to take people all around the country, to their desired destination. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 permitted the construction of a highway system which would

“The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956...created a 41,000-mile ‘National System of Interstate and Defense Highways’ that would, according to Eisenhower, eliminate unsafe roads, inefficient routes, traffic jams and all of the other things that got in the way of ‘speedy, safe transcontinental travel.’”This citation taken from History.com shows the reasons for creating the highway and most will say that it was able to fulfill it’s goals. A famous saying that you may often hear when traveling is “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” For others however, they prefer getting to where they need to go as fast as possible. They want to spend the least amount of time on the road as possible and the highway system makes it easier for them to do this. Highways provide a direct paths to most major areas in the country. Instead of driving down winding streets and taking several turns, you can simply hop onto an interstate and cruise to where you need to go. Highways provide a large convenience to anyone who wants to get somewhere as fast as possible. Some may argue that highways only work for longer distances. This is true but it is more useful to travel longer distances in a shorter time than shorter