In September 1924, the world’s first intercity motorway opened between Milan and the small northern Italian city of Varese. Though it has been downgraded to a strada statale, about 3km of the original two-lane autostrada still exists. The remainder has been overlaid by more a modern motorway, up to 10 lanes wide.
The centenary is a good moment to look back at the milestones on the road to global mobility.
1885: Karl Benz builds his Benz Patent-Motorwagen, regarded as the first modern car.
1900 (April): The Automobile Club (later to become the RAC) organises a Thousand Mile Trial “to counter hostility to the car and demonstrate its revolutionary capacities”. Two months later, Prince Edward (later Edward VII) becomes the first member of the Royal Family to own a car: a Daimler Phaeton.
1903 (16 June): Henry Ford establishes motor company in Detroit; within five weeks he has sold his first car, a two-cylinder Model A. By January 1904 Ford personally establishes a new land speed record of 91mph in a specially built car.
1903 (14 August): After pressure from MPs about the “furious speeds” at which some motorists were driving, the Motor Car Act receives royal assent. It imposes a 20mph speed limit across Britain, and launches driving licences (though no test is required).
1908 (12 August): The first Ford Model T rolls off the first automobile production line; by 1914 Ford is making half the automobiles in the US.
1924 (September): The world’s first intercity motorway opens between Milan and Varese in northern Italy. The engineer, Piero Puricelli, later becomes a fascist senator.
1925 (5 August): The first layer of a national road network is designated in America, when the Interstate Highways Board designates 50,000 miles of road as US Highways. First on the list is US 1, the road that runs from the Maine-Canada border to Key West, Florida. But these are not motorways (or freeways) in the modern sense.
1926 (11 November): Route 66 opens, connecting Chicago with the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica, California. For almost all its course of over 2,400 miles, the road was just a two-lane highway, carrying trucks, Greyhound buses and cars.
1931: The first Highway Code is published by the Ministry of Transport, and includes instructions…
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