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Traveling in this big country always has been a piece of work. But why is it getting worse? Highways grow more congested despite the zillions thrown at them. Adding lanes and loops is not helping. The passenger train system is off track. Fly? Usually, it's faster to walk, given the on-time nightmares.

How did we arrive here? Was anybody ever behind the wheel, looking where we were going? Two recent books examine two parts of the U.S. transportation system. Whoops. System? Mess is more accurate. The ways to clean it up will be expensive and take a long time, these authors say. The political will to do it may never coalesce. It hasn’t yet.

The books are “Asphalt and Politics: A History of the American Highway System” by Thomas L. Karnes (Jefferson: McFarland & Co.; 215 pages, paper, $35) (www.mcfarlandpub.com 800-253-2187) and “Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service” by James McCommons (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing Co.; 284 pages, $17.95).

Karnes, a retired Tulane University historian who lives in Chapel Hill, writes that in the past, the country’s size and culture made creating a national highway system especially difficult. It’s a lively book about boring interstates.

Why write about highways? “The transportation system of every nation, great and small, is a major element in the material wealth of that state; transport and growth are always closely related. It is a given that today’s third world countries remain that way, in part, because of inadequate communication and transportation.”

His history has sweep and detail. I’ve always wondered where the term “turnpike” came from. Some states call them “pikes,” Tennessee, for example. Now, I know. They were privately owned toll roads. Something like a turnstile studded with pikes barred the road until a traveler paid up. The idea is still in use, only the form has changed.

The first to drive across the country? Dr. Horatio N. Jackson, a Vermont physician, with his chauffeur, Sewell Crocker. The trip in 1903 in a two-seater, 20 horsepower Winton took three months. In 1909, Alice H. Ramsey of New York became the first woman to make the trip. She drove a Maxwell-Biscoe. It “had no bumpers, windshield or gas gauge.” She wrote a book about her adventure, “Veil, Duster and Tire Iron.”

In 1912, the Army set out to test four makes of trucks on the worst roads they could find. The Army found them in the upper South in late winter, Karnes writes.

“The drivers … concluded that the North Carolina roads were worse than those of Virginia. A ‘continuous stretch of deep mud and bad holes’ meant an average of two miles per hour some days. Near Greensboro, the mud was so deep the cars smashed their tail lamps. … Near Lexington, N.C., the road was so bad the drivers left it for the higher ground of a farm, only to be accosted by the owner threatening jail for trespass.”

The Army learned, he writes, that at least in the Southeast, the military could not depend on the roads to help defend the country. Later that same year, the War Department launched a cross-country convoy to test military vehicles of all types. The convoy followed, more or less, a coast to coast route promoted by the Lincoln Highway Association, a coalition of automakers, tire manufacturers and what not pushing for the creation of the route, which would be privately financed. One of the officers with the convoy was Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower. As president in 1956, he signed the bill creating the interstate highway system.

Among the leading industrial nations in 1956, the United States was the only one without a national highway system. Italy began building one in 1913. Germany’s autobahns were built by the 1930s. Why were we so tardy?

Two factors were significant, one social, the other political. A lot of people were anti-auto. “Thousands of Americans, mostly farmers, initially believed with Woodrow Wilson that the automobile would destroy the uniqueness of their rural society, that it would bring the evils of the city to the farm.”

Roads were considered a state responsibility. “An abundance of rivers in much of the nation, providing natural transportation, fortified the stance that the national government lacked constitutional authority to fund interstate roads, so it built none.”

Over time, these attitudes changed. The first big push for improved roads preceded cars. It came from bicyclists. After the introduction of the pneumatic tire about 1888, bicycle sales took off, reaching $27 million a year. But few towns had hard-surfaced roads. They were dust and mud. In 1892, a bicycling organization, American Wheelmen, began publishing Good Roads magazine.

Farmers began to clamor for better roads to make the wagon trips to town easier. They found a champion in U.S. Sen. John Bankhead of Alabama. (A granddaughter was the actress Tallulah Bankhead – See? This book is filled with nice detail). He became president of the U.S. Good Roads Association while keeping his Senate seat. When he died in office, he was the only former Confederate soldier in Congress.

After World War II, when the interstate deal was put together in Congress, there was a huge compromise. We experience its effects today. Karnes writes that Eisenhower wanted interstate highways to bypass major cities. The system was partly for defense. Bypassing big cities would assure a smooth flow of traffic from coast to coast.

But he had to yield to get the city votes. Without that support, the bill couldn’t pass. That political decision reduced the military value of the system. “It was also to change America’s traffic patterns, community habits, and style of living for millions of people.” It also jacked up the cost. “City roads meant vast unexpected purchases of expensive urban lands.” Eventually, it would also increase “congestion enormously in most cities.”

The extent and intensity of congestion has grown. The extent of congested highway travel grew from 33 percent in 1982 to 67 percent in 2003. The intensity of it – the average extra travel time – rose from 13 percent in 1987 to 37 percent in 2007.

So, here we are, stuck in traffic. What options do we have?
• Increase capacity. This is the usual approach but it requires a large amount of new money, which is increasingly hard to come by.
• Enhance productivity. A traffic term for signal coordination, making drivers aware of road conditions and managing temporary disruptions such as wrecks.
• Better transportation choices. Trains. Buses. But this category also includes benefits to car pools and work scheduling.
• Road pricing. Charge a toll that will bring demand and capacity into balance. Now, road usage – the supply – is distributed by drivers’ patience, i.e., how long are they willing to put up with the congestion.

He goes into great detail, too, about methods to finance roads. Be warned. It gets wonky here and oh, so boring. But this is the elephant in the dining room. Some states, such as California, Illinois, Indiana, and Virginia, are turning to private companies to build and maintain highways,

For commuters, Karnes recommends: "Get the best hybrid you can afford, an attractive traveling companion, top notch air conditioning, and a radio. Then learn to relax. From now on you will spend your vacation driving to work.”

He’s not joking.

McCommons’ book, “Waiting on a Train,” is an uncommonly good guide to the state of passenger rail service in the United States. In 2008, he rode the 26,000 miles of Amtrak routes.

But he did more than ride. Along the way, he met and questioned every major player who has a role or might have a role in passenger rail. He visited North Carolina, rode the Carolinian from Raleigh to Charlotte and back. He talked to the railroad guy at the N.C. Department of Transportation. The book is a composite of thorough reporting and a nice travelogue.

His conclusion? What a mess. But, unlike the interstates, hopeful signs abound. This system can be made to work. Of, course, that doesn’t mean it ever will. Congress and presidential administrations have been underfunding Amtrak for 40 years. The Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations (senior and junior) were hostile to the idea of passenger rail.

Amtrak was organized and sold to the public under the pretext that it would become self-supporting, he writes. Well, it won’t, he and all the railroad people say.

The great European passenger rail services are all publicly subsidized, as well as the system in Japan. A system won’t work well any other way, he writes.

He quotes Jim McClellan, retired strategic planner for Norfolk Southern:

“This idea that if Amtrak could just be tweaked or fussed with, you could solve all its ills is nonsense. They’ve been doing that for nearly forty years, and it hasn’t worked. There simply is no business model out there that is going to magically solve this. If there was, you would have found it by now. There is not a private-interest solution for intercity passenger trains, there’s only a public sector solution. …”

Though a rail fan, McCommon is no “foamer.” What’s a foamer? “In England, they’re called ‘trainspotters’; in the United States, railroaders call them ‘foamers’ – people who metaphorically foam at the mouth when it comes to trains.” These are the people who photograph passing locomotives from overpasses and hang out at railway yards with hand scanners so they can listen to the crews. They have a huge model train set in their living room. They’re planning a new addition to the house to display it better.

Trains are green, he writes, and do not depend on undeveloped technologies. “We only need to build more tracks, improve the tracks we have, and run more trains – restoring some of the rail capacity that was abandoned for highways, cars, and planes.”

He cites persuasive statistics from the Department of Energy. For every passenger mile, passenger trains use 17 percent less energy than planes, and 21 percent less than cars.

Remember, he says, that the United States once was the greatest railroad nation on earth. “Trains … tied together a nation, helped win a civil war and later two world wars, and created a modern, mobile industrial society.” At their peak in the 1920s, American railroads ran on 380,000 miles of track and carried 1.27 billion passengers a year.

Then, the cars arrived, huge subsidized road building projects got under way, and passengers were pulled off the rails. “Unlike the rest of the world, the United States decided the country didn’t need trains anymore or the infrastructure of rail lines that reached out to nearly every town, every factory, and every citizen. It wasn’t so much a conspiracy as a happenstance of neglect, poor planning, and the usual messiness of democracy and capitalism.”

So, here we are, beginning to rebuild what we had.

This is a good read. It only falters occasionally. The interviews gave the author a problem. They grew repetitive, a bit redundant, yes, a little tiresome. You want to tell him to climb aboard, let’s get this train moving. We’re running late.