Michigan Built the Car — but It Also Built the Road, the Rules, and the First Freeway

Everyone knows Detroit gave the world the affordable automobile. What people don’t realize is that Michigan also had to invent much of the world the car drives in — and it did a startling amount of that first.

The first three-color traffic light in Detroit in 1920 is just one piece. Michigan was a national pioneer of the paved road itself: in 1909, Wayne County laid down a mile of concrete pavement on Woodward Avenue in Detroit — widely cited as the first mile of concrete highway in the country, built specifically because the new automobiles were churning the old dirt roads into impassable mud. Michigan also painted one of the first center lines on its roads (the idea is credited to Edward Hines, a Wayne County road official, who was reportedly inspired watching a leaky milk wagon leave a line down the road).

And then there’s the freeway. The Davison Freeway in Detroit, opened in 1942, is generally recognized as the first urban depressed freeway in the United States — a high-speed road sunk below the surrounding streets so cross traffic could pass over it on bridges, with no intersections or stoplights. It was a preview of the entire interstate highway system that would reshape America a decade later.

Put it together and you get a remarkable picture: Michigan didn’t just build the cars. It worked out how to pave the roads, mark the lanes, time the intersections, and build the freeways — solving the problems of the automobile age roughly in the order the rest of the country would need the answers.