Pick up a map of today and you will become aware of several things: first, how easy it is to obtain a map-any filling station will give you one gratis-and second the primary purpose of them. There are at least twenty-six million more maps in use today than in 1900. Every automobile owner has to have one because he is a potential tourist. People buy maps not to look for cities, oceans, or rivers, but for highways-the shortest highway from one place to another. That piece of paper is literally a network of black lines, red lines and dotted lines-national highways, state highways and country roads. Some of these stretch from coast to coast and from Maine to Florida. A glance at any one of them would show that its traffic is continuous in both directions--endless streams of vehicles, automobiles, buses, trucks, and vans, all moving with speed and precision.

If you look more closely, however, you will see that this rapidly moving stream of traffic is still running through a horse-and-buggy world. A man buys a car that will travel sixty miles an hour with case, but if he makes a trip to a town sixty miles away, it takes him two hours to get there.

Why? Because he has to pass through a dozen small towns and through the busiest street in every town. In this case the road defeats its own purpose. If the country were really built for automobiles, it would be possible to travel along an express highway around the busy streets of all the towns at the possible speed of sixty miles an hour. The old point of view will eventually undergo change, in fact change has already begun. It has taken a long time to make the people realize that they even need roads. Without roads modern transportation would lack its keystone, and without transportation our present civilization would not be possible.

That is the most important thing-this change in the people as reflected in modern transportation. No man is tied down by a narrow horizon. Everywhere roads stretch-invitations to go and find out what is going on in the world outside. All you have to do is drive up to a filling station, buy two dollars worth of gasoline and you can go a hundred miles in any direction and return. That is the reason the world is smaller, it possesses an almost infinitely flexible vehicle on an almost infinite number of tracks. When these tracks or roads have covered every logical course and when anautomobile can travel these roads with maximum speed and safety, then we can truthfully say that the automobile can do nothing further to liberalize the people of the world. (pages 20-22)