Friday / Weekend Open Lines


The first automatic toll collection station went into service this month in 1954. It was installed at the Union Toll Plaza on New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway. Motorists dropped coins into a wire mesh hopper, triggering a green light that told them to go ahead. The idea soon caught on at toll roads around the country, reducing the number of booth attendants and propelling cars and trucks on their way. There are fewer than 3,000 miles of toll roads in the U.S. interstate system of some 47,000 miles. Other U.S. routes and state roads have tolls, but the total is still just a tiny fraction of the nearly 4 million miles of roads in the nation. Toll collections add about $13 billion annually to state and local government revenues. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at <www.census.gov>.

Saturday, November 22nd. National Farm-City Week begins today, ending on Thanksgiving Day, when agricultural bounty is most notable. First declared by congressional resolution in 1956, the occasion recognizes that farms are a necessary precondition for town life and urbanization. As Daniel Webster noted in 1840, “When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers are therefore the founders of human civilization.” To put it another way, everyone has to eat. The U.S. population of 319 million people is sustained by the output of America’s 2.1 million farms, which encompass nearly 915 million acres. To aid farmers in tilling the soil, over 1,100 manufacturers annually produce more than $37 billion worth of farm machinery and equipment. Profile America is in its18th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Sunday, November 23rd. It used to be that going to the bank was somewhat of a chore — park your car, go into a building, and wait in line for a teller. Now, many of us rarely see the inside of a bank anymore. We take care of our financial business at an ATM, by going online, or at our bank’s drive-in windows. The first such drive-up facility opened on this date in 1946 at the Exchange National Bank in Chicago, which offered its motoring customers 10 teller windows with sliding drawers. Now, drive-up tellers are available almost everywhere, and Americans have a choice of nearly 94,000 banks to handle their money, with over 1.5 million employees and nearly $15 trillion in assets. You can find current data on the country’s economy by downloading the America’s Economy mobile app at <www.census.gov/mobile>.