Highways, freeways, controlled-access highways, whatever you call them. When they were first built was there any effort to educate licensed drivers on how to access and drive on these new high-speed roads? We all know what it was like when we first learned freeway driving. I can’t comprehend what it was like when it was the entire driving population.
Before freeways there were a lot fewer people in the “entire driving population.” There wasn’t any efficient way to drive “there,” so people took the train. As freeways got built, people learned how to drive on them (theoretically). More freeways, more people learning. It’s not like the entire population of the Eastern US showed up on the Pennsylvania Turnpike one day.
In the West it was a different story. Everybody did show up to drive the Arroyo Seco Parkway. They’re still there, stuck in rush hour traffic. 
Try driving on one of the parkways in the New York metro area. Fifty foot on-ramps that end in a stop sign. Lots of trees in the median and roadside. My understanding is that these parkways were built literally to give people a place to drive on weekends.
In the UK, there’s been a government-issued Highway Code since the 1930s, and when motorways finally opened in the 50s, a new 5th edition of the Code included guidance on their use (there are updates and new editions every few years, of course).
But there’s been no retrospective re-testing of drivers, or anything like that: it’s just that getting things wrong can come with an unofficial death penalty.
My Dad thought me to drive on the freeway, scared the snot out of all of us.
My Grandfather, for whom the driver’s test was, “Do you have a dollar?”, stopped and yielded on access ramps. Scared the snot out of just me.
Yeah. The Taconic (which is some distance outside the city) was apparently built for casual scenic drives by light traffic not going all that fast. It was pretty hairy even by the 60’s, despite the fact that IIRC trucks bigger than a pickup or van weren’t allowed: no shoulders to speak of, short sight distances so you might come unexpectedly on a problem (such as a broken-down car that had no way to get off the road); and the on-ramps were by modern standards pretty weird, though I don’t remember them having stop signs.
I don’t know whether they’ve rebuilt the thing. I haven’t been there in quite a while. – thank you Google: apparently not. It seems now to be on the historic register, and simultaneously on at least one most-dangerous-roads list. There’s a nice photo about halfway down the page showing one of the stretches with no shoulders at all going through some very pretty blind curves, and a very short entry merge lane with a sharp curve where it meets the road, making it hard to get up to speed.
Wikipedia says the Taconic Parkway is from 1925, while the Merritt Parkway (my favorite) is from 1938. The Bronx River Parkway is even earlier with construction starting in 1907. You can imagine that the cars of that time weren’t capable of going very fast.
Here’s a phoyo from one of the first German Autobahnen in the 1920s or 1930s.
There just wasn’t much traffic on them initially, giving drivers plenty of opportunity to gently familiarise themselves with those new roads.
90% of the bridges are too low (by design) for large trucks. It remains for just cars.
The overpasses on the Merritt Parkway are architecturally interesting, in various styles like Art Deco or Gothic.
In 1967 my mother took us to Rapid City to see our brother’s college graduation. Interstate 90 at that time had a ten-mile stretch by the city (SD finished its last section by 1977). I recall my brother had given my mother specific instructions (“don’t stop!”); after a few minutes she said, “This is easy!” It helped that there just about no traffic. So it was pretty much self-taught then.
That’s less the issue for me than that they apparently haven’t added any shoulders, either. Combining no-shoulders with poor lines of sight produces a really large potential hazard. It would, admittedly, be even worse with semis added in.
US 309 north of Philadelphia was like this until recently. I hated getting on that highway when there was any heavy traffic. You really had to trust your car’s acceleration.
On my second driving lesson my instructor told me to turn right. I asked, “Isn’t that the on-ramp to the Schuylkill Expressway?”. It was. My first taste of highway driving was on one of the most notorious roads in Pennsylvania. I survived. Didn’t even need to change my underwear afterwards.
whoops, started an ETA and forgot about it, way too late now:
The Taconic is, I grant, a really pretty road; and in 1925 I don’t suppose traffic was moving very fast. – hmmm. Apparently race cars and high-level sports cars could hit 120+MPH and some significantly more; but most cars were much slower. Ordinary road speeds I had trouble finding; but I did find a reference to a 1925 Model T whose top speed was 40-45 MPH. I don’t suppose people ordinarily drove long distances at their car’s greatest possible speed.
– this site says while plans started earlier construction didn’t start until 1931; but also says “the speed limit was probably about 35 miles per hour, the usual parkway limit in those days”. And that they apparently did some rebuilding over the years; but the road seems basically still designed for 35MPH – and had a lot of accidents at that speed, though they did fix some of the worst things.
So I suspect part of the answer is that the first highway drivers were dealing with traffic doing only about 35 to 40 MPH. That would have helped.
Does anyone remember the educational films, by Disney, starring (of all the characters) Goofy, on how to drive freeways? Things like merging, signalling to merge, staying up with traffic, etc. I’m assuming every parent of boomer kids got told by his kids what he was doing wrong if he didn’t navigate the freeways properly.
I can tell the antique level of roadways areound town that were obviously laid out before the 1960’s, with their horrendously shot merge lanes, 100 feet of merge crossover between the cloverleaf turns, etc. etc.
Newspaper articles, TV news reports and PSA’s, instructional signs along the road, flyers at the DMV. This still happens today. “County’s first roundabout to open next month, what you need to know.”
I remember those! They used to show up on “The Wonderful World of Disney/Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” on Sunday night.
I don’t know about the rest of the folks here, but we were driving highway speeds everywhere we could when I was a teen, highway or not. That seldom caused any issues either. Accidents came from people running red lights, cars stopping in the road due to mechanical problems ( I T-boned an Impala on my Kawasaki motorcycle at a good clip when they stalled right in the middle of the intersection) and of course booze.
Trust me, we were a lot better drivers than what we see today! Today, it’s all about distracted driving and road rage. None of that even existed when I was younger.
Back when I was in high school Sophomore year you took a semester of Health and a semester of Driver’s Ed. One of the final lessons was “Freeway Driving in a VW Bug.” Nothing like trying to accelerate up a freeway on-ramp in a clapped-out late 60’s Bug with 4 people in it.
And far less traffic so they weren’t trying to merge into fast moving (or often fully congested) highways.