Original subtitles

[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.