OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 320 PAGES, $35 CONCRETE AND ...

TY PRESS, 320 PAGES, $35

CONCRETE AND STEEL are serious, permanent sorts of materials, so it is easy to believe that the highways have always been with us. The pre-highway world was a different place, and every day that passes, the nation has fewer people who remember it, just as it has fewer people who don't suffer from an abject dependency on the highways themselves. Almost every new American will eventually be a new driver; and almost every new American learns that the ideal citizen is the restless one-and that the greatness of our country is tied to its wanderlust. For this reason, it's also easy to believe that the highways will always be with us, that they are America, and that indeed they will be here after us; that we will crumble to dust long before they do and they will be our Parthenons, masterpieces going slowly to rubble, a testament to the strange gods we worshipped.

A history of our highways that does away with this myth once and for all would be welcome, but may also be beyond the abilities of any scholar. With the highways, as with television, it is hard to tell where the national imagination ends. But Owen Gutfreund's Twentieth Century Sprawl makes a nice contribution to the effort. The book starts with the premise that the highways have not always been with us, and that a lot of them, truth be told, are in miserable shape. It may seem impossible that such sturdiness-thick concrete pillars, soaring on-ramps, broad plains of asphalt-could ever go weak. But the highways are the product of a bygone era. They were created during a more lavish age of American infrastructure development, when the government was doing things like sending men to the moon, vanquishing totalitarian empires and launching massive projects to remake both city and countryside. Today, for reasons both good and bad, the government no longer does such things-or does them in a sorrier and more hollow way.

The ebullience of the freeway years, with their economy that ballooned impossibly, creating a free-spending middle class, is gone. Taxpayers, having watched their incomes stagnate in the last three decades, now see the government as one more outstretched hand, and from this poisoned perspective begrudge it for every tax dollar they are compelled to hand over. And yet the need for infrastructure has not disappeared with our desire to fund it. The auto age marches on, and so we drive more miles, in more and heavier vehicles, on highways we all want but don't want to pay for.

Gutfreund's book shows us that things did not have to be this way. The highways themselves were inevitable, but for a time it seemed they would be paid for directly by drivers, through the now-reviled but eminently sensible system called tolls. We have no interstate tolls, however: not because they failed (no toll road has ever gone bankrupt), but because a consortium politely known as "the highway lobby" insisted that drivers should never pay directly for the freeways.

What the lobby called for and got was a system that Gutfreund calls "highway federalism." The federal government, using gas tax revenues-which by law could only be spent on highway projects-would pay for 90 percent of any interstate project. Whatever state the freeway ran through would kick in the remaining 10 percent.

On its face, this looked like a great deal for the states. In reality it has had regrettable and sometimes disastrous consequences. Ten percent of a highway construction project may be a small proportion of that cost, but in absolute numbers it was often a sizeable proportion of a state's budget-particularly in smaller states. Highway money became money not spent on education, not spent on aid to cities and towns, not spent on better urban transportation systems. The states placed a disproportionate emphasis on highways, and so highways became disproportionately important. Because they emphasized long-distance travel, the freeways helped fuel the abandonment of cities, and the economy became built less around downtowns and more around exit ramps.

And yet the states could hardly walk away from the money on the table. One result of our federal system is that states compete, and if everyone else is adding more highway mileage, the question of whether your state actually needs more is, well, just missing the point. Once everyone else has it, then you most certainly need it.

There are consequences to our not paying for highways the way we pay for other goods. One is that gas tax revenue gets locked away and cannot be spent for other purposes. We are so accustomed to this situation that it seems normal, but if the logic that governed the use of the gas tax governed the use of all taxes, cigarette tax revenue would go exclusively to funding tobacco subsidies. (In recent years some gas tax money has been diverted to public transportation, but it is almost too little too late.) And, in any event, gas tax funds alone cannot maintain the highways, which get used more every year while the tax rate lags behind.

Most of all, however, in perpetuating the idea that the ground beneath our wheels is free, we have divorced cause from effect, and allowed ourselves to wonder at questions whose answers should be obvious: Why do we have so much traffic? Why have our communities sprawled? Why are our roads and services in decline? We would use our roads more judiciously, and they would be in better shape, if we paid for them more directly. But we prefer not to do this. We choose instead to move their costs into the abstraction that we call the tax base, and then with all our might we do all we can to make that abstraction disappear. We put our public obligations in a box and then regularly elect people who say they can kick the box off the boat without making the boat sink. And so to the myth of unfettered mobility we add the myth of politics without consequences. Both are corrosive; both demand a corrective. Now as ever, too much public policy is predicated on the maintenance of agreeable fictions. o