50 years ago, gaps in highways were common; calling 'shotgun!' for the rear-facing seat
was a right of passage in your parents' station wagon; and gas stations had more in common with
the boonies than your Sears catalog. Buckle your seat belt. There are more surprises ahead!
Writing for The Washington Post, freelance writer Sheryl Stein shared
some of her memories about road travel in the ’70s. She talked about the detours that
were required by her dad in order to bypass unfinished interstates, saying:
"The detours were not usually entertaining and sometimes ended poorly ... Most of the time,
we ended up driving down local streets where the weathered old
houses presented a very different picture than the well-manicured suburb we'd left behind."
The decay of these small towns was only just beginning. The creation of the interstates
also gutted most other small towns economically. The reason for it was because travelers chose
the faster interstate routes over the smaller state and county roads that passed through town.
"Look at all those roads! Criss-crossin' the country! I mean, it is unbelievable!"
"It is, and it's keeping people busy."
While they are far and few in between, there are still true gaps in highways.
For instance, Interstate 69 was meant as a highway that would connect Mexico
with Canada. It was even nicknamed the quote, "NAFTA Super Highway".
The NAFTA Super Highway isn't complete yet and has been in discussion for years. However, highway
gaps, now, compared to gaps in the '70s are nowhere near the inconvenience they used to be.
Before the digital music revolution, there was a long history of audio
systems in automobiles starting with the simple idea of a radio in a car.
In the '60s and '70s, however,
pre-recorded music looked much different within the scope of automobile features.
As the Hagerty Magazine describes it in a multi-part series on obsolete car audio:
"[W]hile it's well-documented that the first car with a factory 8-Track was the 1966 Mustang ... I
see references to Mercedes as having Becker radios with cassettes beginning in 1971.
Most sources list the general envelope of cassette adoption as 'mid-1970s.'"
With this in mind, imagining a road trip 50 years ago would probably involve a family
fighting over which radio stations, 8-Track tapes, or even cassette tapes to play.
Meanwhile, the landscape of AM/FM radio was going through its own shifts. By the mid-1970s,
as Understanding Media and Culture describes it:
"FM radio accounted for one-third of all radio listening but only 14 percent of radio profits ...
Stations began tightening their playlists and narrowing their formats to please advertisers
and to generate greater revenues. By the end of the 1970s, radio stations were beginning to play
specific formats, and the progressive radio of the previous decade had become difficult to find."
Did you know that Sammy Hagar came up with "I Can't Drive 55" because of a
nationwide speed limit of 55 mph enacted in 1974 by Richard Nixon? The policy was
Nixon's attempt to save 200,000 barrels of oil a day after the Arab oil crisis of 1973.
The pushback on the law was tremendous. Everything from rock songs to abolishing
the law becoming a platform for the Republican Party in the 1980 election. Needless to say,
the law wasn't popular. Despite the pushback, the law was sustained til 1987
when Congress allowed states to reset the speed limits within their borders.
Still, because proponents of the law said it lowered total fatalities,
the law remained on the books until 1995. These proponents weren't completely wrong
either. One study in the American Journal of Public Health showed that there was:
"3.2% increase in road fatalities
attributable to the raised speed limits on all road types in the United States."
This percentage amounted to 12,545 deaths and 36,583 injuries between 1995 and 2005.
So while people in the '70s and '80s, including Sammy Hagar,
couldn't handle driving 55, they probably should have.
In 1970 alone, people spent $6 billion on fast food. By 2000,
according to a review of Fast Food Nation, that number rose to $110 billion.
When it came to eating on the road, convenience became the name of the game.
Instead of pulling into a drive-in, people wanted to minimize their wait
time and maximize their travel efficiency. Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's, noted:
"The drive-in used to be real popular, and there are more
cars on the roads but there are less drive-ins."
Thomas recognized that, which made him put a service window on his original Wendy's
store and every store after. Burger King and McDonald's followed in 1975. By this point,
households had two income streams and longer commutes due to urban development.
Nearly 40% of food dollars spent was being spent on eating out and this wasn't just a
signal of change in familial eating habits. It was also a change in the kinds of food
that were served by restaurant chains like the well-loved Chicken McNuggets.
It also led to evolving interior car features like flat-folding glove box doors,
which was a luxury in some earlier vehicles, but didn't become the standard till the 1980s. The
drive-thru window ultimately became the grease on the profit wheel of fast-food restaurants.
When the modern driver thinks of gas stations,
they think of full service convenience stores with bathrooms and all kinds of
snacks one can load up in their arms. This is actually a fairly recent invention.
In the '70s, gas stations were for gas ... and maybe a Coke machine. No bathrooms,
no other amenities, no food and drink options, just gas. According to the University of Houston:
"By 1970 America had over 200,000 gas stations. Then things began changing. By 1990,
half those stations were gone, and their number keeps falling."
They delineate gas stations from service stations,
which is more in line with what is common today. Even if one could find a gas station,
by 1974 it didn't mean that there was always going to be gas after the Arab Oil Crisis.
A retro editorial piece in the Baltimore Sun discussed the difficulties this caused, writing:
"Seething drivers waited in queues, some five miles long,
for hours in ... 'bread lines on wheels,' hoping to fill up; too often, stations ran out of gas.
Fights broke out, station owners were threatened and some began toting guns."
This was just in cities. Just consider what might have happened with people
stuck in the middle of nowhere with little gas to go around.
When talking about gas stations selling only gas and not much more, the next question on
everyone's mind is: where did people stop to use the restroom? The answer? Rest stops.
What many may not know is that rest stops were part of the original Federal Aid Highway Act
of 1956 which started the construction of the interstate highway system as a whole.
It was a 90/10 funding process where the Federal government mostly funded their creation, but the
state had to pay the other portion and design and build the rest stops themselves. By the 1970s,
developers started to design rest areas. According to Rest Area History, they became:
"Forms that drew on regional imagery such as oil rigs, windmills and tipis… [which]
reflected the architectural heritage of indigenous people."
Eventually, many of the sites where rest stops and rest areas that were built
attempted to engage the local culture and landscape. While rest stops still exist
to this day, they've ended up being more of a stop gap between convenience
stores and bathroom stops than the only bathroom solace on your entire trip.
Hitchhiking is such a novelty to most people today, but back in the 1970s,
it was a legitimate way to travel across the state or even across
the country. Statistician Bill James noted in an episode of "Freakonomics":
"[Hitching] drove itself out of existence.
Basically nobody hitchhikes anymore ... And the real danger was not hitchhiking;
it was the fact that you had a certain number of random crazy people who will hurt you."
"What do you want to do?"
"Oh he's weird lookin'."
"Pick him up man."
"No!"
That's something that hasn't changed with time,
and people have become a bit wiser to that. As The Atlantic describes it:
"Eliminating hitchhiking doesn't ... do anything to change that. So,
it was a social change that protects the individual."
"Well, I think we just picked up Dracula."
It wasn't so much the fear of violence that led to less hitchhiking. Sociologist
David Smith noted to Vox that the increase in overall car ownership,
especially in lower classes, probably had the biggest impact on hitchhiking.
Also, with the increase in interstates being built across the country in the '60s and '70s,
there were less opportunities for hitchhikers to thumb a ride
in small towns and on smaller roads where a car could just pull over.
Interstates are more policed, and people seldom stop on them until they get off on
an exit. It seems that hitching largely died out with enhanced roads and cheaper cars.
Perhaps one of the most unique elements of road trips in the '70s was that in some station wagons,
some family members would have a whole different experience of road travel than the rest.
This was because there were cars with rear-facing seats that we just don't see anymore due to
safety reasons. As John Cushman, Jr. wrote in The New York Times in 1999:
"That third seat was called the way-back not only because of its location in the car,
but also because it described the view that the kids saw out the wagon's rear window. No matter
where the family traveled, the occupants in the third seat could see the way back."
Compared to the minivans that pushed out the station wagons over the years,
the ratio of seat belts to exits was more desirable.
Any kid could fold up that third row seat inside a station wagon.
Whereas, when it came to minivans and SUVs? It'd involve the removal of a whole row of
seats in order for more cargo to be placed in the back. However, according to Cushman,
Jr. sometimes safety ends up trumping convenience and that's probably as it should be.
"This is the automobile you should be using. The wagon queen family truckster.
You think you hate it now? But, wait till you drive it."
Many of us have heard stories from parents and grandparents about the
magical time prior to seat belts being a necessary safety feature of driving.
The Detroit Bureau reports that quote, "[back] then, only 10 to 15% of occupants buckled up."
It got so bad that by the late '60s, the national death toll on highways was nearing
50,000 deaths a year. However, the rage against compulsory seatbelts
was particularly strong in the 1970s considering the Interlock Seat Belt Fiasco.
Engineers designed an interlock seat belt with two sensors inside that required
every person in the front row of the car to buckle up before the car would even start.
After the car started, one could unbuckle, but, according to reports at the time, this didn't
happen often. However, the rush of this new technology into cars wasn't without its bugs.
The general disapproval of being told what one can and cannot do only added to the
collective frustration. This ultimately led to an uproar by American drivers.
"If everybody has to buckle up or pay a ten dollar fine,
businessmen say they'll stop and shop, and get their haircut somewhere else."
The outcry was so bad that Congress passed a law soon after
outlawing the interlock seat belt feature.
There is an old adage, often among older generations,
that things are no longer built to last. While this can be true
it wasn't always the case with vehicles in the 1970s. According to The New York Times:
"The average age of vehicles on the road in the United States
stretched to a record 11.1 years in 2011."
It is far more common today to find online classifieds selling used cars that have 150,000
to 200,000 miles on them which the owners note still have a lot of life left.
"If you've never bought a Volkswagen cause' it wasn't big enough. Okay.
Here's a Volkswagen that's big enough."
In contrast, cars back in the '60s and '70s would only go to
99,999 miles before flipping back to zeroes. Also, the popular wisdom of the time was
that driving cars beyond 100,000 miles would potentially bring about a minefield of issues.
Richard Ratay, author of "Don't Make Me Pull Over!" spoke with The Atlantic about
the improvements involved in road trips now as opposed to ones in the 1970s. He reminisced:
"I remember my dad packing up all sorts of tools and extra belts and fuses, because you
didn't know when you were going to break down on a family vacation. It wasn't a question of
if you were going to break down — it was almost a given that you were."
Geographical Information Systems were in their infancy in the 1970s. It was the beginning of
the technology and data data mining that would be the base of GPS and our smart phone map apps.
Yet in the 1970s, people who traveled used paper maps to get around the country
on their road trips. These maps were hand-scratched into plastics before
they were printed. According to an article from the United States Geological Survey:
"In the 1970's, scribing on coated mylars and color separation using peelcoats
became the method for producing maps and would
not change significantly until the introduction of computers."
Updated information on construction and traffic and even speed traps were never known in the
minute like they are now via Google Maps or Apple Maps. It took time to produce maps every year.
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