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The Humanity of the American Rest Stop [1]
['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2024-09-18
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
I love a long drive. There’s something about hitting the open road (preferably Highway 1, 50, or 61) with Wide Open Spaces by The Chicks blasting through the speakers and a dog panting in the back seat that makes me believe in the American dream.
Chief among the things that can make or break a good road trip is a rest stop, my favorite form of public infrastructure. Besides libraries, there are few places I can think of whose primary function is to serve everyone who stops in, regardless of income status.
Rest stops – or as they’re formally known, “safety rest areas” – were created by former president Dwight Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. This law expanded the interstate system by 41,000 miles and at the time was the largest public works project ever authorized. Two years later, Eisenhower passed another road-funding law, the Highway Act of 1958. The combination of these two acts totally altered the way Americans transport themselves – and changed the way they interacted with the communities they traveled through.
In rural areas, highways were built along railroad routes that bypassed small towns, which meant less travelers stopped in those communities to spend money. In urban areas, many of the poorest neighborhoods were replaced by highways, creating housing shortages.
The suburbs, on the other hand, flourished. Gone were the days that Americans lived walking distance from a locally-owned grocery – driving a hulking piece of steel 30 minutes to shop at the latest big box store became the new norm.
Now, car culture feels inescapable. I find many downsides to this culture, but a big one is the sheer cost of owning a car. Registration fees, insurance, gas, and the thousands of dollars required to purchase a car add up quickly. Pollution and danger to humans and animals are just a few of the other things I think about often.
The glimmering piece of hope amidst all this car obsession is the rest stop.
The rest area was first created to accommodate travelers’ needs as they began driving longer distances on America’s new highway system. But since, they’ve become one of the few examples of a public space where you can exist without feeling pressured to spend money. Eisenhower’s 1950s highway legislation prohibited commercial establishments from operating at public rest stops (with a few exceptions like vending machines), in order to drive business toward small towns instead of consolidating it all in one stop. This makes them gloriously free of the pressure to spend money, which is an alarmingly hard thing to find in public these days.
I have a whole catalog of favorite rest areas. There’s one roughly halfway between the Oregon coast and Portland that I stop at every chance I get. A short hiking trail takes you through the forest, and it’s lovely enough to forget the heavily-trafficked bathroom just a few hundred yards away. If you visit in the fall, you can watch salmon migrate in the creek that runs through it.
Of course, I’ve also been to less than pleasant rest areas (there’s a stop near Tri-Cities, Washington that comes to mind…), but at every one I’ve been to, I’m impressed by the government’s decision, years ago, to accommodate the biological needs of millions of strangers. The humanity in this decision makes it even sweeter – the government said yes, we see your undeniable need to pee, and we will give you a place to do it for free.
Imperfect as the public rest area might be (funding is unequal across states, which can lead to shoddy upkeep or closures), they represent a vision of a world that could be.
What if each of our human needs were met with the same spirit as the public rest stop?
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