The Great American Road Trip is Dead

Thinking to pack up the car and the kids for a cross-country road trip? Think again. Seriously.

If you’re like me and grew up on hair band MTV and Brady Bunch reruns, you might still recall the three-part Brady saga where the Bunch, along with the always dutiful Alice of course, pile into the Bunchmobile—their massive, gas-guzzling station wagon (how little things have changed!)—for a grand trip to the Grand Canyon. Out on the open road, for the Brady’s it’s all smiles and sing-alongs… until they all end up locked inside a ghost town slammer while their car is stolen! But for the rest of us a half century later, being unjustly jailed and having one’s car lifted are mere trifles compared to the modern horrors that now await on today’s roads.

A recent round-trip from Connecticut to New Mexico—2,300 miles one-way—only strengthened my resolve to never go on another cross-country romp. There’s really no fun in it anymore. In fact, it’s now just misery and toil. The highways, despite their ample signage and well-delineated lanes, are increasingly descending into Mad Max-style combat zones where rage, mayhem, and carnage prevail. And long-since gone are the days when, while driving through open road, you could see… open road. Now, if you don’t see roaming packs of 18-wheelers barreling both ways pedal-to-the-metal, you’re actually in bed dreaming about the open road.

The nation’s roads and highways are now miserably clogged with traffic. In 2021, there were an estimated 289 million registered vehicles on the roadways—5 million more than just two years earlier—and with each passing day it becomes ever clearer that there’s just too many cars, trucks, buses, RVs, 18-wheelers, and “wide loads” out there burning rubber. And with all these vehicles comes further problems: more and more tailgaters, more and more speed demons, more and

more stop signs, and more and more red lights and orange cones and jersey barriers and “Construction Ahead” signs and arena-sized intersections and blown tire chunks and dead animals. Even worse is that this black circus breeds compounding problems: more frequent road construction and repair, greater numbers of fender-benders and serious crashes, more traffic-slowing pullovers and breakdowns, and more frequent wrecker calls and police reports and tort claims and injuries and fatalities—the entire terrible mass of it all boiling down into one inescapable fact: more of us stuck in traffic!

Seemingly perverse but in fact rather logical, on the busiest roads in hundreds of cities throughout all of America, the more clogged the roads the more insane the drivers. Long ago I’d puzzled over this fact, thinking people would choose to drive slower to stay safer. That would seem to be logical, no? But then the “alternate facts” logic T-boned me like a stunt car: in a desperate bid to escape the rat race, individual drivers drive faster. But then, like joining the bumper car circuit at an amusement park, where the point is to add to the fracas, the faster one car goes the faster every other car must then go. And with that, almost paradoxically, rational behavior manifestly leads to an inevitable rise in the likelihood of events—cars and trucks, that is—spinning out of control. So, instead of us all getting to where we want to quickly, we’re increasingly ending up going nowhere fast.

Yet there is no escape even if you turn for the nation’s secondary roads. Because, besides having to slow-crawl through every boom and bust along the way, the problem is that, with freeway traffic ever-increasing, more tax dollars have to be channeled towards their upkeep, leaving fewer repair dollars for today’s Route 66’s. The tradeoff becomes physical: roads that eat tires, pop struts, needle the kidneys, and tingle the spine (the last a Vincent Price horror flick, he having guest-starred in a Brady two-parter while the Bunch were off on yet another grand adventure).

The nation’s roads are not only an environmental wreck—ugly tar scars through forest and plain that double as animal and insect killing fields—they’re a growing economic wreck as well. All during my 4,600+-mile voyage I saw more than just one or two massive distribution facilities going up, meaning ever greater hordes of big rigs soon to be gear-grinding and gas-guzzling (okay, diesel-guzzling) down the “freeway.” So while you might pop a wheelie for free shipping or that quick-hit bag of Doritos at the next exit’s QuickieMart, as the nation’s roads veer towards greater gridlock you’ll increasingly be paying for it as you wait in ever-longer lines of snarled traffic, breathe in ever-more brake dust and tailpipe emissions, and shell out ever-more cash for goods and services as higher transportation costs get passed down to consumers.

“You can’t get there from here.” 

—Maine Proverb

The United States needs a serious transportation rethink. Rather than building more and wider roads, we should instead tailor our nation’s highway funds towards fostering transportation-lite modes of commerce. Even with the COVID-19 pandemic’s (now-fading) shift to the Zoom economy, there still as yet remain significant economic pockets where commerce can flow, and institutions can function, without anything actually being moved. So rather than the IRS giving a tax break on taxi/bus/plane/train fare for an executive to network (i.e., test-fire meaningless buzzwords like “network”) at a business function in Farflung, U.S.A., we should instead flow tax benefits towards those who steer commerce down a different route. And rather than our roads also doubling as vanity-pleasing self-identity nodes, with every automaker shamelessly manipulating people into believing transportation is identity, the federal government should aggressively up-shift our roads towards maximum efficiency. At an intersection, six small, fuel-efficient cars can fit just the same as three “angry” trucks. Yet I fear that America has so badly taken the wrong turn on transportation efficiency that it will surely take generations before peoples’ illusions about cars and driving to reach E.

But when it comes to getting behind the wheel in the first place, there’s really not much point anymore heading off to Tampa or Tulsa or Texarkana, since every exit now just leads to the same old Taco Bell or TGI Friday’s or Texas Roadhouse.

Along historic Route 66, the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge was used to film the car chase scene in the film, Escape from New York