@ Susan Russell Steinbeck was prescient in many matters ! I grew up on seriously *remote ranches in Montana. We did not lock our doors at all.

During the day we left a pot of coffee on the stove for anyone who might need a cup while we were out trailing cattle. We left a key in our pickup truck at night, so that any hapless traveler in trouble could take it into town to get gas, or whatever else they might need, without waking us up to ask permission.

Users would almost inevitably return the truck with a full tank of gas in *it. In remote *freezing areas like that, if people did *not take care of one another, we would find their bodies at the time of spring melt.

Then came the Interstate Freeway in about 1968. Within about a year, I came home on leave to find *all doors locked (in town, close to the freeway) and people suspicious of one another even when they would stop to help you with a flat tire. So all of the many decades of the *advantages of small, bucolic little towns disappeared in less than one year in my little Podunk town, leaving us with nothing but the *disadvantages of remote "wide spot in the road" villages.

From then on, a person could take the off ramp into our town, commit murder and mayhem, jump back on the freeway and be in North Dakota before our sleepy little cop-shop became aware that there had *been a problem in our town earlier that night.

Freeways in many aspects are wonderful inventions. But there WAS collateral damage to a long-established American way of life.