This is another wonderful example of Heinlein doing Technofiction. Here he presumes mankind, American mankind in particular, comes up with a transportation revolution, and builds a story around its ramifications. The revolution in this case is, things don't roll over the roads, the roads themselves move and carry stuff on them.
The other interesting thing about the beginning is how well he portrays the skilled worker thinking and speaking patterns of the early 20th century that supported unionism/socialism/communism. "We're skilled. We're good at what we do. The world will be a lot worse off without us. That makes us indispensible... if we stick together. And if we do we should get a lot more from society, as in, we should get paid a lot more and get better working conditions. But shhh! Be careful what you say and where you say it. There are finks (informers) everywhere and they'll rat out to the Bosses/The Man what are true feelings are and we'll pay! We'll be out on our ears in a heartbeat, or worse!"
For some context: This was published in 1940. Since 1925 and 1933 the world had been watching Mussolini and Hitler transform Germany and Italy into totalitarian states in the name saving people from more Great Depression ravages. And Stalin was pumping how communist-style industrialization was leaping Soviet Russia into the Machine Age. In the process a lot of saber rattling and some actual blood-letting had been going on -- Japan and Italy had both started up wars of colonial conquest. In all of these societies, and America, industrial workers were praised as being the heroes of the industrializing revolution that was going to transform the world into an earthly paradise. The jury was still out on how industrializing would change social relations. Maybe one form or another of socialism would really work out and replace capitalism supported by liberalism, maybe not.
In sum, there was a lot of industrial worker-oriented rhetoric floating in the air, lots optimistic, some scary, and the catastrophe of World War Two begins between the writing and publishing.
Heinlein brings up the portable phone concept, and video with audio, but he doesn't come up with the cellular antenna concept for letting the phones roam around widely. His phone is tied to a specific location. Next he comes up with some interesting speculation on automobile development. He correctly identifies a lot of problems, but isn't quite so good about seeing solutions. (But, then again, if he brought up good solutions, he couldn't justify the "roads" in this story.)
Another interesting insight: he puts this new road in the Central Valley in California. He didn't put it in New York City or Chicago areas -- the big wealth and population centers of the time.
In the middle he puts in a lot of technofiction speculation on how cities will grow in response to having widespread automobiles. It's fun to read. He also decides to buy into the Peak Oil concept (and this is the 1930's!) and have fossil fuel declining in use and importance compared to solar. So solar is his energy of the future. Umm... sounds familiar. Maybe someday soon it will happen in real life.
Whoops! As I read on I find that Stockton road isn't the first road, it's just another road. He puts the first road between Cleveland and Cincinnati, in the Midwest, the Steel Belt of his era. Good, that makes a lot of sense for that era -- there was a lot of wealth and innovation going on there, and the Midwest Disease thinking that would ravage the area's innovative talent would not become noticably dominant for three decades.
In explaining how the road works there's a lot about heavy industrial conditions -- like railroads and steel mills -- with machines grinding and whining in conditions uncomfortable for humanity. There is nothing about computerization -- people, not computer programs, in grimy, noisy and otherwise unpleasant settings watch simple gages and actual machines looking for trouble. This is first-half 20th century Industrial Age envisioning. Once again, it demonstrates how surprising the computer technology we now live with has been for humanity's visionaries. Computer visions of this era are tied to robots of the robot butler sort (constantly wondering if they had souls) and computing rooms with big mainframe-style computers, not ubiquitous monitoring and communications systems. "Big Brother is watching you", which is of the next decade, was a human watching a screen.
He does a nice job of pointing out a weakness of his roads system, then builds his story around it. The weakness is it's single source: there's no redundancy, no system that can replace it if it fails.
So... his antidote for the stress of such a critical bottleneck? Enfranchisement! Morale and Esprit de corps as he calls it. (from his military background)
Ouch! A wonderful description of disaster as the main roadway stops but its next-door feeder strip does not. Only problem I have with it on this reading (but not previous readings) is that it's such an obvious problem that it should have been planned for.
Good! Heinlein lets his protagonist keep his priorities straight: solve the big problem, the analytic one, not the instinctively compelling minutia problems that are close at hand -- the accident casualties. This is a welcome departure from a lot of story telling. And as a nice plot device the protagonist's companion is an instinctive thinker by trade -- a politician. We listen as he grates over some of the choices made by the protagonist. We hear what's inside the head of both. This is something Heinlein handles well in his stories and this is a good early example.
Ah... an interesting mix. Unconverted solar energy is tranformed into benign glow-in-the-dark radioactivity. Heinlein was not immune to the story telling magic of atomic power in this pre-nuclear bomb era.
In the interests of story telling, Heinlein makes this failure a huge effort to fix. Once again, in real life there would be redundancies of many sorts available on something this singular and important. (He does point this out later in the story.)
And back into a 3D environment underneath the road -- difficult, dangerous and dirty -- and noisy. A common enough environment in heavy industry and manufacturing environments of that era. Hah! He comes up with the concept that produced the modern Segway motor bike; calls it a tumblebug. Curiously, he doesn't equip his workers with helmets that combine noise reduction with radio communication. I guess he figured radio would be too bulky. Instead the workers use customized sign language in this noisy environment.
He devises his own form of "workers' rights" philosophy, and notes, correctly, that the 30's were filled with crazy ideas trying to explain how mankind should live in this new, heavy industry-oriented, Industrial Age.
And I had forgotten: For pulp fiction writing psychology was a powerful medical breakthrough in the first half of the 20th -- it was going to explain in detail a lot of human thinking, and in science fiction versions solve a lot of human problems. This was when Sigmund Freud's ideas were thought to have enormous potential to explain human idiosyncrasies and correct, or at least weed out, pathological ones. The protagonist uses psychology to out-wit the antagonist.
All-in-all, a real good technofiction and adventure story for its day, and a wonderful flashback to what people were thinking about as upcoming science and technology in the 1930's.