The Road That Stopped Being a Road
Two hundred miles of old US highway, and the towns the interstate left behind in 1962.
An interstate does not kill a town quickly. It takes about a decade, and the sequence is always the same: first the motels, then the two gas stations, then the diner that had been there since before the war, then the school.
What is left is not a ghost town. Ghost towns are dramatic. What is left is a place with a functioning post office, forty people, and a main street built for four thousand.
The bypass economy
The old highway is still there, and driving it takes about twice as long. This is the whole appeal and also the whole problem — the towns survive on people who have chosen to take longer, and there are not very many of those.
The interstate did not take the traffic. It took the reason to stop.
Some of them have worked it out. A good bakery, a motel someone has actually renovated, one bar that stays open past nine. It is a thin margin, and it depends entirely on the next town over not having thought of it first.
