When the turnpike was like an arrow through the head

the "arrow in hat" logo, which was simplified in later years (the "Massachusetts Turnpike Authority" text was removed - but the arrow was retained), was eliminated because the arrow was confusing drivers who thought it indicated which direction to go in to enter the highway.

I think the comparison of Callahan to Robert Moses is not the best one. I think that the better comparison would be Ed Logue to Moses, and even then, you have a difference of several orders of magnitude.

That said, I know that people love to hate on Robert Moses, particularly since Caro's unflattering biography "The Power Broker", but you have to at least acknowledge that the New York City metropolitan area would not be the huge economic engine it is today had it not been for Moses. I know, I know - the highways led to sprawl, etc., but the economy there would have been a fraction of the size that it is today without them. Whether it was worth it is another question.

One thing I should point out in defense of Moses, however, is that the oft-repeated charge that he built roads only on the backs of poor people is an oversimplified exaggeration and not wholly accurate. Certainly, he was responsible for obliterating serveral, even many low income neighborhoods (the Cross Bronx Expressway project comes to mind) and displacing a lot of people in the process. He also, however, built several parkways on Long Island that went straight through the treasured polo clubs and other properties of some of the most powerful people in the country (and the story about the overpasses on said parkways being intentionally constructed as too low for buses, and therefore, as the logic goes, preventing poor people from going there, is a distortion). He is also responsible for the construction of Jones Beach, one of the country's premiere beach/recreation facilities, and if you take a trip down there on any hot summer weekend, you will see that it is not a playground reserved for the rich.

Moses was certainly not what we today would call a champion of the downtrodden, but he worked in a very different era and one that preexisted environmental permitting procedures as we know them. Last thought: the PBS American Experience series produced a piece called "The World that Moses Built". If you can find it (and that is not easy), it is worth watching, as it is much more evenhanded than Caro's book.