Route 66 – What happens when the economy that built a road disappears

Bob Waldmire lived in a converted school bus and spent thirty years driving Route 66 in both directions. He made a living selling hand-drawn maps of the road, detailed, idiosyncratic documents that recorded every diner, every neon sign, every shuttered motel between Chicago and Santa Monica. He drew them by hand because he believed the road deserved to be read slowly, in the same way it deserved to be driven. He died in 2009. His maps are now collector’s items. The road, which had been erased from every official atlas, had found another way to survive.

The Route

Route 66 was officially designated on April 30, 1926, linking Chicago, Illinois to Santa Monica, California across eight states and 3,940 kilometers. In 2026, it turns 100 years old, a century since its designation, and 41 years since its decommissioning. Between 1926 and 1985, an estimated 200 million vehicles drove it. The highway connected what were then the interior towns of the American heartland to the two coasts, passing through Springfield, St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Albuquerque, and Flagstaff before its descent to the Pacific. By 1938, it was fully paved — the first continuous paved route from Chicago to Los Angeles.

Today, approximately 85 percent of the original road still exists in some drivable form, though it is no longer an official highway. It is designated as Historic Route 66 on state signs, maintained by preservation societies, mapped by enthusiasts, and driven by millions of tourists annually who come to experience a road that the United States government formally deleted from its highway system four decades ago.

The Problem It Was Built to Solve

Route 66 was built to solve the problem of the American interior. In 1926, the country’s road network was fragmented, unpaved in most sections, and organized around local needs rather than transcontinental movement. A driver attempting to cross the country faced a different road system in every state, with no consistent numbering, no guaranteed surface, and no reliable fuel or food supply. Route 66 was part of the first attempt to impose a national grid on American roads, to connect the interior to the coasts with a single, consistently marked, eventually consistently paved route.

Then the road was handed a problem it was never designed for. In 1930, the Dust Bowl arrived across the Great Plains — severe drought, soil erosion, and crop failure that destroyed the farming economies of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and Arkansas at once. Approximately 210,000 people loaded everything they owned onto trucks and drove west, and Route 66 was the most direct paved route available. 

Then the road met the one problem it could not survive: efficiency. In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, authorizing the Interstate Highway System — limited-access, high-speed superhighways engineered for the automobile economy of the postwar boom rather than the Depression-era economy Route 66 had served. The Interstates were wider, faster, and indifferent to the small towns Route 66 had sustained. 

By 1977, Route 66 had ceased to exist in Illinois. In October 1984, the last segment was bypassed by Interstate 40 in Arizona. On June 27, 1985, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials officially removed Route 66 from the US Highway System. Road signs were taken down. Maps no longer listed it. It was, for all practical purposes, erased.

The System It Reveals Today

The road that was erased is now one of the most famous tourist routes in the world. This is the intelligence Route 66 contains, not what it was, but what it became after it stopped functioning. And what it became is a lesson in what a country does with the things its own efficiency renders obsolete.

The towns Route 66 bypassed into near-death have, in several cases, survived precisely because the bypassing preserved them in amber. Seligman, Arizona, the town that lost everything when I-40 opened in 1978, is now a significant Route 66 stop, its 1950s diners, barbershops, and storefronts intact because there was never an economic reason to replace them.

But the most revealing evidence is not in the architecture. It is in who now drives the road. On much of the route, international visitors now outnumber Americans: one University of Illinois study found overseas travelers making up the large majority of tourists surveyed at Route 66 sites, most of them British, German, and Australian, and foreign spending is estimated to account for a substantial share of the road’s tourism revenue. European motorcycle clubs fly into Chicago, rent Harley-Davidsons, and take three weeks to reach the Pacific. Amboy, California, a ghost town with a population of zero, remains a fixture on the itinerary precisely because its abandonment is the attraction.

This is the detail that breaks the easy reading of Route 66 as nostalgia. You cannot be nostalgic for a country you never lived in. Most of the people now driving the Mother Road have no memory of the America it belonged to; they have come to verify an America assembled from films, songs, and advertisements, a place they have imagined for years. The road did not survive as American memory. It survived as American myth, and its largest market is now the export of that myth to people who buy it because the country it depicts no longer exists. Route 66 is no longer infrastructure that happens to attract tourists. It is a cultural pilgrimage whose object is a nation as thoroughly decommissioned as the road itself.

Reading the Road

Driving Route 66 in 2026, in the road’s centenary year, is a specific experience no other American road produces. The route exists in fragments, stretches of original two-lane asphalt connecting towns the Interstates left behind, interrupted by sections where the road simply stops, and the driver rejoins I-40 for twenty miles before picking up the historic alignment again. The fragmentary quality is itself the intelligence: this is what a road looks like when the economy that sustained it has moved on, and only the memory remains.

The landscape changes in ways that are not scenic. The Missouri Ozarks give way to the Oklahoma flatlands to the Texas Panhandle to the New Mexico high desert to the Arizona painted desert. The road carries history in its surface. The motels that charged fifty cents a night in 1935 charged fifty dollars in 1975 and now charge a hundred and fifty to tourists who want to sleep in the room where the Okies slept.

In Amarillo, Texas, Stanley Marsh 3 buried ten Cadillacs nose-first in a field beside the road in 1974, an installation since painted over by visitors thousands of times and now one of the most photographed sites on the route. The Cadillacs are the correct metaphor: luxury objects from the American golden age of automobile culture, buried in the Texas Panhandle, repainted layer over layer by people who want to leave some mark on the road. Route 66 has been inviting people to leave their mark since 1926. The Cadillacs just make the invitation literal.