The automobile forever changed roads, but these changes were the results of deliberate campaigns.

City streets have been around as long as the thousands of years cities have existed. Traditionally the legal rule was that all persons had an equal right to a public street – whether it was someone leisurely crossing to a neighbor’s house, children playing ball, or a motorist in a powerful automobile – and it was the responsibility of each user to take care to not injure another user. But when the automobile came along, many wealthy owners of cars with top speeds of 40, 50, even 60 mph wanted to more utilize those capabilities without being made out as villains every time a dog wandered into their path. Soon automobile lobbying organizations were formed, and public relations campaigns were launched.

Most successful was the creation of the term “jaywalker,” implying a “rube” or naïve newcomer from a rural area uneducated as to how to properly cross a street and so dazzled by the big city lights and activities that he staggers out into traffic. By the 1920s, most newspapers were onboard and reversed who was to blame in reports of pedestrian/motorist accidents. The lobbying groups successfully implemented safety education programs in schools, teaching children that streets were for cars, and children needed to stay out of them.

Projects like the Park and Boulevard System in Kansas City prepared urban areas for the arrival of the motorcar. But the widespread adoption of automobiles was dependent upon road improvement in rural areas too. Outside major cities, where streets were typically paved with stone or brick, roads were little more than rutted dirt paths that turned into patches of mud when it rained. Traditionally, roads had been the responsibility of locals, typically a temporary amateur workforce with agricultural equipment using centuries-old building and maintenance techniques.

What was needed for motor vehicles were “365-day roads.” Engineers had perfected asphalt, a petroleum product that hardens when it cools, for hard-surface roads. Even unpaved roads could be improved by grading and adding drainage ditches. But by 1914, Kansas had only 390 miles of hard-surface roads, and Missouri had only 5,270 miles, as compared to more progressive states like Ohio and Indiana, both with more than 30,000 miles.

Good Roads Associations sprung up all over the country. Typically organizational leaders included individuals involved in automobile manufacturing and sales, construction equipment and materials, and oil and tire companies. The campaign of the Good Road Movement focused on three main goals: easy access to urban markets for farmers, consolidation of schools for rural students, and establishment of connecting roads between major cities.

All of this required changes to how road building was funded. National funding for overland trails and canals instigated by far-sighted early presidents like Jefferson and Madison were stopped in their tracks by the states’-rights president Andrew Jackson. By the time of the railroad boom of the latter half of the 19th century, the national government legally could only support infrastructure improvements through generous land grants to private developers. But in the second decade of the 20th century, the Wilson administration got some national funding assistance for road building approved as part of the Rural Free Delivery (RFD) program of the U.S. Postal Service. (In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration achieved vastly more national funding for interstate highway construction by labelling it a defense program.)

Farmers were encouraged (through bank loans and other means) to switch from raising crops (which required roads to market just a couple of times a year) to dairy and egg production (requiring 365-day roads). Parents were encouraged to support consolidated rural school districts with high schools that would require passable roads. Awards were given for model roads in rural areas, maps were distributed showing where improved roads could be built, and locals were goaded to support road building and progress or risk being left behind.

Image Top Left:
A whole campaign created by automobile lobbying organizations ridiculed as — unsophisticated — those who didn’t surrender their right to city streets to motorists.

Image Top Middle:
Boy Scouts were given these cards by the Kiwanis to educate people how not to “jay walk.”

Image Bottom Middle:
A wooden highway sign in Kansas, perhaps the first on U.S. 36, 1925.

Image Left Bottom:
The Good Roads Association of Greater Kansas City was headquartered at the Coates Hotel.

Image Green Box Top #1:
A 1922 cartoon depicted the costs to rural people of not building roads.

Image Green Box #2:
Two flyers in favor of the Good Roads Amendment initiative. To change how roads would be funded required amending the Kansas State Constitution.

Image Green Box #3:
Cook & Stucker Paving Company workers laying a brick road near Kansas City, Kansas.

Image Green Box #4:
A section of paved highway the Good Roads Association helped get built. It would eventually connect Kansas City with Lawrence.

Image Green Box #5:
By 1918, except in a handful of Kansas counties, road improvement had made little progress.

Image Green Box #6:
A 1922 recommendation by Missouri state engineers to connect major population centers with 1,500 miles of road.