Somewhere east of San Bernardino, Route 66 begins to feel more like a dispute than a road. An argument about what America was, what it is, and whether or not those two things can coexist today. The Mojave extends in all directions. The sky is vast. And you’re wondering if anyone in Washington has ever seen a motel that closed the year a new interstate opened.
At 100, this is Route 66. Furthermore, it is unquestionably the most truthful economic report the US has ever created.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Official Name | U.S. Route 66 — “The Mother Road” |
| Year Established | November 11, 1926 |
| Total Length | Approximately 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers) |
| Start Point | Chicago, Illinois |
| End Point | Santa Monica, California |
| States Crossed | Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California |
| Father of Route 66 | Cyrus Avery, Oklahoma businessman and visionary |
| Year Decommissioned | 1985 (replaced by Interstate Highway System) |
| National Register Listings | More than 250 buildings, districts, and road segments |
| Primary Economic Role | Connected industrial Midwest to Pacific Coast; fueled roadside commerce |
| Cultural Immortalization | Featured in The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, Bobby Troup’s “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” |
| Current Annual Visitors | Millions globally — including significant European tourist traffic |
| Preservation Status | More than 90% still drivable in California; active preservation across all eight states |
| Key Economic Inflection Point | 1972 — Interstate bypasses caused overnight traffic drops of up to 98% in some towns |
| 2026 Major Development | BNSF Railway constructing the largest railway-to-truck freight facility in the U.S. near the route |
The road, which connected Chicago’s industrial might to the California coast, was pieced together a century ago from abandoned trade routes and dirt tracks. The businessman from Oklahoma who advocated for it the most, Cyrus Avery, recognized something that urban economists frequently overlook: commerce occurs outside of cities. It takes place in the miles that separate them.
Avery picked the number 66 in part because she thought it would be memorable, marketable, and something that a driver could commit to memory after a demanding day behind the wheel. In ways he probably couldn’t have predicted, he was correct.
It’s difficult to avoid feeling the weight of a century pressing down when you stand in Santa Monica in early 2026 and watch a Waymo robot taxi glide silently along Santa Monica Boulevard, which is technically a section of Route 66.
Skydance, which recently acquired Paramount, and Activision Blizzard, a gaming conglomerate that could be transformed or destroyed by artificial intelligence in ten years, are located within a few square miles. Here, the future is loud, costly, and incredibly unequal. Economic inequality has consistently been high in Santa Monica. That is not novel. The potential rate of gap widening is new.
That future becomes quieter the further east you go. San Bernardino, which is two hours away from Los Angeles, seems to have been visited twice by history: once during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when impoverished families arrived in camps after fleeing environmental devastation across the Great Plains, and again in the 1970s, when the interstate highway system subtly rerouted traffic and allowed entire business corridors to fade.
The retro signage, T-shirt stores, and wigwam-shaped motel rooms are examples of kitschy nostalgia that aren’t cynical. It’s survival. It’s the tourism industry doing what it always does: generating income from memories.
A man by the name of Matt Parker was working up a ladder at the Bagdad Cafe in Newberry Springs on a weathered wooden sign. He claimed that the building’s patina was genuine. earned. not covered in paint. Parker, a photographer and general handyman, made a statement that resonated. Employment isn’t even a casual conversation in a place where there aren’t many jobs.
You don’t inquire about someone’s occupation. That inquiry presupposes that there is work to be done. That has a depressing quality, but it also has an odd kind of dignity—the refusal to reduce people to their economic role when the economy has mostly ignored them.
Even Newberry Springs isn’t immobile, though. Parker detailed his plans for a campground he calls Sweet Haven, which will be constructed around a lake that he plans to replenish using a deep well on his land. In the meantime, the BNSF Railway is building what will eventually be the biggest railway-to-truck freight facility in the US just down the street.
There could be thousands of jobs in a corridor that hasn’t seen such an investment in decades. This might be an actual representation of something. The survival of international trade in the current era of tariff-driven economic nationalism may also be the only factor. There is a connection between the two.
Amboy’s Roy’s Motel and Café is the kind of location that prompts economic historians to use metaphors. The counter employee, Nicole, put it succinctly: Roy’s flourished until the interstate opened in 1972. Overnight, traffic fell to two percent. Two percent. What was left rebuilt itself around a different type of visitor: busloads of French road trippers, Italian tourists, and Germans following a late 1980s movie that was shot here.
There is an Italian-language sign warning against trash in front of the recycling bin. That has a wonderful, slightly surreal quality to it. European nostalgia for American mythology sustains an American ghost town.
More than any textbook chart, the economic history of Route 66 reflects the larger 100-year arc of the U.S. economy. The road became well-known during the postwar boom of the 1940s and 1950s because cars were reasonably priced, wages were increasing, and access to the open road seemed natural. Entrepreneurs along the route were inventive and unrelenting, constructing neon palaces, rattlesnake pits, and totem poles to attract drivers’ attention and money.
The interstates followed, followed by consolidation and a protracted decline that left some towns as ghost towns and others frantically trying to reinvent themselves around whatever market remained.
The pattern is consistent with larger economic cycles in the United States: boom, disruption, uneven and sluggish recovery, and then another boom. In contrast to the frenzies of the 1920s or the late 1990s dot-com era, economists who have studied the U.S. share market over the past century observe that the current moment, despite its anxieties, appears to be relatively mild.
Overvaluation is not the only factor that causes booms to collapse. When something causes a loss of trust, such as a banking crisis, a policy shock, or the realization that the music has stopped, they fall apart. No one along Route 66 is completely certain whether AI is the catalyst or the fuel for the next stage. But they are observing.
Every forecast of the road’s obsolescence has been surpassed. That may be the most significant lesson it imparts. Towns that ought to have disappeared are still present, offering postcards and cold beverages along with the indescribable sense of being on a road with significance. In order to demonstrate his belief that Route 66 is a crucial component of American culture and history, Sebastiaan de Boorder, a Dutch businessman who restored the Aztec Motel in Seligman, Arizona, with his spouse, relocated from the Netherlands. Somewhere in there is a lesson. An outsider can sometimes see things that insiders have forgotten.
This year marks Route 66’s 100th anniversary, bringing with it all of its paradoxes: the wealth and the destitution, the nostalgia and the true rebirth, the abandoned motels and the upcoming freight hubs. The issue has not been resolved. It’s a living one. And that’s what makes it American above all else.