America’s roads tell a story of ambition, incentives, and unintended outcomes. The interstate era promised speed, safety, and national reach; the funding machine that built it never really wound down. As Erick Guerra explains, we finished the planned network around 1991 and then kept going, adding roughly 75 percent more urban highway lane miles. The result is a system that delivers higher average speeds but worse mobility where it matters. We also inherited a financial burde