Pave It Black returns for its 11th season to celebrate the 250th birthday of America by looking at the role asphalt pavement and infrastructure have played in America’s economic development. To kick things off, we sit down with Peter Norton, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. We explore how goods and people moved across the US in the 1700s and 1800s and how asphalt beat other surface materials to become America’s chosen surface.
Tune in for a conversation that blends transportation history, industry evolution, and forward-looking insight into what maintaining our infrastructure will require in the years ahead.
Here’s a sneak peek into this week’s conversation but be sure to tune in to the full episode for all the insights. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
BW: Peter, to kick us off, I’m curious if you could share a little bit about the history of what American roads really looked like before they were paved in asphalt, or paved in general, and a little more about what the experience was for people moving goods before we had that paved infrastructure.
PN: We live with roads as part of our daily lives, so it’s a little hard for us to picture just how different they would have been. Since this is approximately the 250th anniversary of independence, it’s worth remembering that we heard about roads even in late colonial times.
Think about Paul Revere. He had to ride a horse on roads in the Boston vicinity. He didn’t have I-95 to deal with, but he did have headaches of his own, like unpaved roads. Part of what made that a heroic venture was that the roads of 1775, when that ride took place, were nothing like they are today, and that’s why people 250 years ago generally avoided roads if they had any other choice.
Boston was there because it was a shipping center. It had a port, and it was a communication center thanks to the fact that people traveled by ship, whether they were going across the sea or following inland waterways down to, say, New York or Philadelphia. River traffic was important, and it was so much better that if you didn’t have a river, you made one in the form of a canal.
The Erie Canal is one reason why New York passed Philadelphia, because it connected the Great Lakes with the Hudson River and New York City. It’s hard to conceive today how it could be better to build an artificial river than to build a road, but that’s how different it was, especially for freight.
This season is sponsored by FleetWatcher by AlignOps
