The national highway network has allowed Americans to live, work and travel wherever they choose. Truckers use it to move $300 billion in goods annually, including fresh seafood and produce from one region of the country to another within hours.

It gave birth to fast food, fast cars and fast service – staples of today’s economy. McDonald’s, Holiday Inn, Ford Mustang, RVs, SUVs, suburban malls and chain stores all owe success to the system.

Even our movies and music illustrate America’s love of the open road. The Great Race and Cannonball Run became Hollywood blockbusters. The Grateful Dead popularized “Truckin’” and “On The Road Again.” Ray Charles made “Hit The Road, Jack” an American idiom.

But the growth of cities and towns along the system – and the tough luck of those too far away – reflect the greatest influence of the Interstate Highway System on the American way of life.

Families hastened to the suburbs and exurbs. Business and industry followed. More women moved into the work force, creating the two-income family with two cars for the parents and often a third for teenagers to take to school or the mall. Rush hour soon turned into crush hour.

Dr. Mike Hirsch, head of sociology at Huston Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, said it was inevitable because of the country’s new-found mobility.

“Interstate highways transformed urban America and gave rise to urban sprawl as we know it,” he said. “It opened up for development the peripheries of cities . . . facilitated the blending of communities along those corridors.”

The American landscape reshaped so fast that the National Cooperative Highway Research Program likened it to the universe’s big bang. It conducted a study that found U.S. productivity soared because of commerce stimulated by the interstate highways.

Hundreds of thousands of construction jobs resulted from building interstates across the land. The bulk of the road work occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, although the most expensive piece of the longest interstate highway – 3,020 miles of I-90 from Seattle to Boston -- didn’t get completed until this year as part of Boston’s Big Dig.

The Federal Highway Administration estimates it cost about $130 billion to build the interstate system without the Big Dig section, an afterthought plagued by corruption that took a decade and nearly $15 billion to finish.

Originally, Eisenhower proposed financing the system with toll roads. Instead Congress set up a special highway trust fund, fed by federal fuel taxes and other user fees.

Trust-fund money paid for 90 percent of interstate construction. The states picked up the remainder. They were also made responsible for policing and maintaining the highways.

Today there are 62 separate interstate highways, but only nine transcontinental or border-to-border routes. North-south highways were assigned odd numbers, and east-west routes even numbers. Beltways and spurs carry three numbers.

There are also 55,500 bridges, 15,000 on-and-off interchanges, 104 tunnels – and zero red lights.

But not an abundance of billboards. They were restricted by the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, a pet project of Lady Bird Johnson. Billboards already in place were protected. New ones were limited to advertising products for sale on the sign’s property. Some states went so far as to ban them completely.