One Hundred Years of Progress, by Raymond Forsyth and Joseph Hagwood, California Transportation Foundation, 174 pages, $28.95
In 1995, the California Bureau of Highways celebrated its centennial as the custodian of one of the most famous and most maligned road systems in the world. This photographic essay on the development and expansion of the Golden State’s roadways, which began in the late 1760s with the creation of an overland route from northern Mexico to Spanish-held California, highlights the opening of the West’s first freeway—the Arroyo Seco Parkway between Pasadena and Los Angeles—in 1940, and the modifications undertaken in the last quarter-century to make the state’s freeway system earthquake-proof.
