This report from the Arizona Republic does a good job of why it’s important the old, abandoned gas stations are being cleaned up along old Route 66, especially in a stretch between Holbrook and Winslow.

The Department of Environmental Quality program is sparking new interest in development along the Mother Road. Before, no one was willing to even touch these properties because of the liability involved of cleaning up those stations’ underground fuel tanks. This program eliminates that problem.

Scott Nelson and his Eisler Bros. Store on old Route 66 in Riverton, Kan., has seen some interesting visitors in the past few years.

The people of Pixar Animation Studios made several visits at the store while researching Route 66 for their “Cars” movie.

More tidbits about Pixar and the movie can be read in this report (registration required) by the Topeka Capital-Journal.

The Capital-Journal also has this more-general report about Route 66 in Kansas — all 13 miles of it.

The 50th anniversary of the U.S. interstate highway systems has been observed for a few months now. However, I’ve found that most media accounts of the interstate’s history, impact and future have been shallow.

Until now. Patrick May of the San Jose Mercury-News published a remarkably comprehensive report about the interstates’ impact on California. Naturally, what has happened to California is a microcosm of what happened to the rest of America with the “superslabs.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched one of the nation’s most extraordinary public-works projects by signing the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the interstates have democratized our lives, equalizing job opportunities and bringing home-ownership within reach for millions. They dictate where we live, work and play. Their fingerprints are all over — on land-use patterns and automobile design, fast-food empires and family vacations, even on our personal sense of time and space.

Interstates have ripped the heart out of established neighborhoods, then pulled sparkling new towns out of thin air, sprouting car lots and strip malls along suburban routes, creating housing tracts near freeways gummed up by the very congestion home buyers had fled in the first place.

More changes are coming. From the Bay Bridge metering lights to the jammed 405, along the 710 where a stream of container trucks feeds the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, through suburban traffic jams from Sacramento to San Diego, the interstate system has hit a wall. “They were too efficient,” says Berkeley architect Michael Webb. “Now they’re feeding on themselves.”

Planners are scrambling to steer the aging system around a crisis that threatens the economy and the lifestyle it spawned. Just as California was molded by the mobility and speed these roads once routinely provided, it is being convulsed as congestion brings them closer to a standstill.

It’s an even-handed and clear-eyed report. It includes a section about how the creation of Interstate 40 decimated the once-bustling Route 66 town of Amboy.

Recommended reading.

The Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona is celebrating its centennial this year. The Arizona Republic has a story about the park’s history and its magnificent scenery.