Travel: One for the Roads

A nation's character, like a man's, can be read in the lines on its face. The roads that lace the U.S.'s 110,000 hamlets, towns and cities into a single organism have transformed a remote, leisurely agricultural society into a compact, highspeed industrial civilization that is in constant pursuit of mobility.

The superhighways of the U.S. are a monument to motion (see color pages). Once, European tourists returned from a visit to the U.S. talking of Manhattan's skyscrapers. Today they talk of the U.S. road. A ride across the arching bridges, down the six-lane...