Is Food Really Illegal at Interstate Rest Stops? A 1956 Law

If you have driven the turnpikes of the Northeast or Midwest, you’ve probably repeated the same routine many times. You pull off the highway into a big service plaza, fill your tank, grab a burger from a fast-food court, pick up a coffee, and merge back onto the road without ever crossing an intersection or stopping at a red light. Drive across almost anywhere else in the country, however, and pulling into a public rest area yields a very different experience. Instead of a bustling food court, you find parking spaces, public restrooms, a bulletin board of local travel pamphlets, and a at best, a row of vending machines. If you want a hot meal or a tank of gas, you have no choice but to take an exit, navigate a series of ramps, and hunt for a commercial strip off the highway. This sharp contrast has fueled a recurring piece of road-trip lore that sounds like an urban legend: selling food at Interstate rest stops is illegal. Given the turnpike experience, this is a confusing claim. However, it is fundamentally true. Under federal law, commercial establishments, including restaurants, convenience stores, and fast-food chains, are strictly prohibited from operating inside standard Interstate highway rights-of-way. The 48,000-mile network of expressways built to move Americans across the continent as quickly as possible was deliberately engineered so that drivers could not buy a sandwich on the road itself. They had to purposely leave the interstate and enter into a local commerce system. It is easy to think that the existence of those massive turnpike food courts is proof that the law doesn’t exist, but it most certainly does. Those exceptions are the result of a mid-century legal loophole that created two completely different types of American highways. So, why would the government engineer a 48,000-mile highway system designed for maximum speed and convenience, yet deliberately ban motorists from buying a sandwich or a tank of gas on the highway itself?

The 1956 Mandate: 23 U.S. Code § 111

The legal origin of this highway divide traces back to the single most consequential infrastructure bill in American history: the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Championed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the act authorized the construction of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. To make sure the new superhighways could be built quickly across state lines, the federal government agreed to shoulder an unprecedented financial burden, covering 90 percent of the construction costs through the newly established Highway Trust Fund.

Tied to that massive federal check, however, was a strict statutory condition. Codified into federal law under Title 23, United States Code, Section 111 (23 U.S.C. § 111), Congress drew a hard line down the shoulder of every new Interstate:

“All agreements between the Secretary and the State transportation department for the construction of projects on the Interstate System shall contain a clause providing that the State will not permit automotive service stations or other commercial establishments for serving motor vehicle users to be constructed or located on the rights-of-way of the Interstate System.”

The statutory language was clear and uncompromising. A state could not build, lease, or authorize any commercial operation, whether a diner, a fast-food counter, or a gas station, within the federally funded highway right-of-way.

Under the law, Interstate rest areas were designated strictly as safety facilities, not commercial hubs. Their legal mandate was confined to offering tired drivers basic, non-commercial necessities such as free parking, public sanitation, running drinking water, picnic areas, and travel or safety information. When a state accepted federal trust money to build an Interstate corridor, it surrendered the right to sell so much as a cup of coffee on the shoulder of that road.

Protecting the “Exit Economy”: Why Congress Banned Commercial Plazas

To modern drivers accustomed to roadside drive-thrus, banning food and fuel along a 48,000-mile expressway sounds counterintuitive, if not downright hostile to travelers. But Congress wasn’t trying to inconvenience 1956 motorists. The motivation was somewhat more pure. They were actively protecting Main Street America from an unprecedented economic threat.

Before the Interstates, cross-country travel flowed along routes like US-66, US-40, and US-1. These two-lane highways ran directly through the downtown commercial centers of thousands of small towns. While that setup caused terrible traffic bottlenecks, it was the economic lifeblood of rural and suburban America. Independent diners, motor courts, regional roadhouses, and corner filling stations all depended on the steady stream of passing cars slowing down on their main streets.

When federal planners laid out the Interstate System, they deliberately bypassed these town centers with wide, limited-access bypasses designed for 70-mile-per-hour travel. Small-town business owners, along with powerful trade groups representing independent petroleum retailers, motel associations, and local restaurant owners, saw financial catastrophe on the horizon.

Their greatest fear wasn’t just being bypassed, which was bound to happen. Even worse was the prospect of the government handing a monopoly to massive national corporations inside the highway median, entirely eliminating the need for a driver to ever exist the interstate.

On earlier state-run turnpikes, authorities had granted exclusive, lucrative concessions to single vendors, most notably the orange-roofed Howard Johnson restaurant chain. If the federal government built publicly funded, captive rest plazas along every new Interstate corridor, only a handful of well-capitalized national conglomerates would have the scale to bid on them. A single corporate contract could capture every hungry driver on the highway, suffocating private enterprise on adjacent lands and wiping out local tax bases for miles around.

Congress listened to these concerns. By writing Section 111 into law, they engineered an intentional economic compromise: the “exit economy.”

Under this compromise, the highway right-of-way remained strictly public, neutral, and commercial-free. If drivers wanted to spend money on food, lodging, or gasoline, the law forced them off the main expressway, down an exit ramp, and into the local economy.

This single legislative restriction shaped the entire geography of roadside America. It created the familiar cluster of highway signs, franchised fast-food rows, gas station plazas, and motels that sit perched at the foot of highway exits nationwide, ensuring that private enterprise competed on private land, rather than inside a state-subsidized corridor.

The Exit Ramp Irony: Moving the Monopoly Fifty Yards Away

There is a rich historical irony in how this compromise played out. Small-town business associations successfully lobbied to keep massive corporations from monopolizing the median, believing it would force travelers down their main streets and into local mom-and-pop establishments. Instead, it simply created a new, hyper-concentrated commercial frontier.

The parcels of private land immediately surrounding Interstate exit ramps quickly became some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the country. More importantly, this land was completely raw. Exit ramps were routinely dumped into rural farmland, woodlots, and open pastures miles outside municipal utility grids.

Turning a cow pasture into a functioning business required gargantuan upfront capital. A business owner had to pay to extend municipal water mains or drill deep commercial wells, install private industrial septic systems, bring in high-voltage power lines, level uneven topography, and fund access roads and turning lanes on sleepy county two-lanes.

An independent diner owner or local service station operating on razor-thin margins in town couldn’t secure the massive loans required just to clear the dirt and lay pipes. Only well-capitalized national oil companies, corporate hotel chains, and fast-food giants, like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Shell, had the financial leverage to absorb those staggering infrastructure costs and erect the high-dollar signage needed to lure drivers cruising at 70 miles per hour.

In the end, the law protected the local tax base, but it rarely saved the mom-and-pop business. Instead of having to drive five miles into an actual town to eat at an independent diner, motorists today often pull off the ramp into an identical, sterile row of corporate drive-thrus, fill their tanks at a corporate pump, and immediately get back on the highway, never seeing the actual town at all. The corporate monopoly Congress feared was merely displaced by fifty yards.

The Big Loophole: Grandfathered Toll Roads

If federal law explicitly forbids commercial establishments within the highway right-of-way, why can you pull into a cavernous service plaza on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Ohio Turnpike, or New Jersey Turnpike and order a Whopper, a slice of pizza, or a tank of gas without ever taking an exit? This strange exception comes down to timing. Specifically, it was caused by a grandfather clause written into the 1956 Act.

Long before Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, several states had already begun building their own modern, high-speed, divided expressways. The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened its first section in 1940, followed in the late 1940s and early 1950s by projects like the New Jersey Turnpike, the New York State Thruway, the Ohio Turnpike, and the Indiana Toll Road.

Crucially, these roads were built without federal money. They were funded entirely through state municipal bonds and intended to be paid off by toll revenue.

Because they were closed-ticket toll networks, drivers pulled a paper ticket at an entrance barrier and paid a cashier when exiting. Forcing a driver to exit the highway just to get gas or lunch would have been an operational disaster: motorists would have had to queue up at tollbooths, pay a partial toll, find a local diner, merge back through yet another tollbooth, and resume their trip (this often happens, a frustration I’ll explore below).

To keep traffic moving, toll authorities designed dedicated, captive service plazas directly in the medians or alongside the outer shoulders. Drivers could pull in, eat at a state-contracted concessionaire (frequently Howard Johnson), fill up at an Esso or Gulf station, and slide right back into traffic, all without worrying about going through another toll.

When Congress laid out the Interstate system in 1956, it was economically impractical to build brand-new, parallel freeways next to hundreds of miles of existing and perfectly functional expressways. Instead, the federal government simply integrated these state turnpikes directly into the Interstate network, adding route shields like I-76, I-80, I-90, and I-95 onto pre-existing toll roads.

To make the merger work, Congress wrote a specific exception into Section 111: commercial facilities already in existence or under contract prior to January 1, 1960, were legally grandfathered in.

As long as a state highway authority did not use federal trust funds to construct or expand those specific right-of-way service plazas, the state could retain its commercial leases and continue operating full-service travel centers.

This is also why these sprawling plazas are almost exclusively concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest. Across the South and West, post-war highways were largely free-access roads built from scratch using the 90-percent federal matching funds. Because states took federal money to build those corridors, Section 111 took full effect, permanently banning the creation of on-highway commercial food courts.

The Reality Check: Decaying Plazas and the Toll Trap

While the theory of the self-contained toll road was designed for pure convenience, modern drivers know the reality is often far less idyllic. Operating restaurants in the middle of a highway median is an economic and logistical ordeal. Staffing isolated facilities, hauling freight through toll gates, and maintaining aging infrastructure has caused many rural service plazas to deteriorate. Across stretches of older toll systems, travelers regularly pull into dim, neglected plazas where half the food counters are permanently shuttered, and lines at the solitary remaining counter wrap around the lobby. The food that exists is often stale fast food that is a far-cry from what customers expect from a national chain, or convenience-store roller food.

When faced with an unappealing or defunct plaza, drivers frequently do the one thing the turnpike system was designed to avoid and take an exit anyway. The result is the frustrating “toll trap.” A motorist is forced through an exit tollbooth to pay a partial toll, only to discover that older turnpike exits rarely dump you directly into a convenient highway commercial strip. Instead, you find yourself navigating local stoplights, commercial traffic, and unfamiliar surface roads just to find food.

Yet even when drivers are dumped straight into a local municipality, the original dream of funneling travelers into mom-and-pop roadside diners almost never materializes. A road-tripper who just burned twenty minutes escaping a toll road doesn’t want a leisurely sit-down meal. They want speed, predictability, and a familiar drive-thru window so they can get back on the road.

After fighting local traffic to reach that chain drive-thru, they have to retrace their route, queue up at another tollbooth, and pay split-toll rates to resume their journey. This presents quite the historical irony where motorists pay extra tolls and endure municipal stoplights just to visit the very fast-food chains the toll road’s planners tried, and ultimately failed, to keep self-contained behind the barrier.

The Solitary Exception: The Vending Machine Loophole

If commercial food sales are banned within the Interstate right-of-way, how does almost every public rest area in the country get away with having a bank of vending machines dispensing cold soda, bottled water, candy bars, and bags of chips? In this case, another explicit act of Congress carved out a highly regulated exception.

Under the original 1956 mandate, even coin-operated vending machines occupied a legally murky gray area. For decades, federal highway administrators generally took a hardline stance against any commercial activity on the grounds that even a machine constituted a retail transaction within the right-of-way.

That changed with the passage of the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982. Recognizing that tired motorists needed access to quick hydration and a simple caffeine or sugar boost to stay awake at the wheel, Congress amended Section 111 to specifically authorize states to place vending machines in rest areas. Importantly, however, lawmakers did not hand these machines over to private corporate vendors or highway vending conglomerates. Instead, Congress linked the exception directly to an existing piece of New Deal-era social legislation: the Randolph-Sheppard Act of 1936.

Originally enacted during the Great Depression, the Randolph-Sheppard Act gave blind individuals priority to operate vending facilities on federal property. When Congress opened the door to rest-stop vending in 1982, they mandated that priority for operating these machines must be given to blind and visually impaired vendors through state licensing agencies.

Under this framework, rest-stop vending isn’t a corporate revenue stream for state departments of transportation. The machines are typically owned or serviced by licensed blind entrepreneurs, with proceeds directly supporting their livelihoods and state vocational rehabilitation programs. The law remains strictly drawn to this day. Under it, machines are permitted to sell only packaged food, snacks, and non-alcoholic beverages. There can be no cashiers, no freshly prepared hot food, and no retail counter service.

To modern readers, tying highway soda machines to a Depression-era blind rehabilitation act sounds completely bizarre. Why would Congress pair Interstate highway maintenance with vocational programs for the visually impaired? The answer is a story of congressional compromise and legislative cover.

By 1982, state departments of transportation were facing a maintenance crisis. Rest areas were expensive to maintain, clean, and police, and states desperately wanted revenue streams to offset those costs. At the same time, the powerful truck stop and petroleum lobbies, represented fiercely by groups like NATSO, were guarding Section 111 with their lives. Any attempt by a state to install commercial food or drink was viewed by the lobby as the slippery slope toward full-blown highway privatization.

Congress needed a way to give drivers basic refreshments and give states a small operational concession without triggering a massive war with the off-ramp business lobbies. Their solution was a bit of political judo. They would marry the vending expansion to the Randolph-Sheppard Act.

By framing the rest-stop vending loophole not as a commercial expansion, but as a protected public welfare and employment initiative for visually impaired citizens, Congress created a bill that was virtually impossible to vote against. What member of Congress was going to step up to a microphone and argue against an initiative supporting blind workers just to protect the beverage margins of a truck stop down the road?

The provision was quietly woven into the massive, omnibus Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982, a mammoth piece of legislation that also raised federal fuel taxes, established standard national truck weights, and set aside billions for bridge repairs. Tacked into the middle of hundreds of pages of technical transportation code that few lawmakers read in its entirety, the vending clause sailed through.

It gave motorists their cold drinks, threw states a small operational bone, and effectively neutralized the corporate lobby by cloaking commercial vending in an unassailable social safety net.

The Modern Battleground: Food Trucks, NATSO, and EV Charging

While a law passed in 1956 might seem like ancient history, the fight over Section 111 is as ferocious today as it was during the Eisenhower administration. Decades later, the ban on commercial rest stops remains the subject of aggressive corporate lobbying and intense legislative battles. There are also occasional and unexpected cultural skirmishes.

At the center of this defense is NATSO (the National Association of Truckstop Operators), along with convenience store associations and petroleum marketing groups. Whenever cash-strapped state governments propose “commercializing” public rest stops to offset maintenance budgets, usually by suggesting private partnerships with fast-food chains or corporate convenience stores, NATSO and off-ramp businesses immediately mobilize. Their argument has not changed in seventy years! Allowing states to monetize the public right-of-way amounts to state-sanctioned competition against private businesses that invested billions of dollars developing off-highway exits. How fiercely this line is defended became glaringly obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the spring of 2020, widespread restaurant dining closures left long-haul truckers stranded without reliable access to hot meals while hauling essential goods across the country. In response, the Federal Highway Administration issued a temporary, emergency waiver allowing states to permit commercial food trucks to operate at Interstate rest areas.

To exhausted truck drivers, having hot food trucks parking at their their federally designated rest areas was a desperately needed relief. Yet even in the middle of a national emergency, the move faced immediate pushback from brick-and-mortar exit businesses, who argued the trucks were siphoning away already depressed customer traffic. The moment emergency declarations expired, the waiver was revoked, and state transportation departments were forced to evict food trucks from rest areas to bring their highways back into compliance with Section 111. Today, the battleground has shifted from burgers and diesel to kilowatts.

The rapid adoption of electric vehicles has triggered a modern rerun of the 1956 debate. State transportation departments want to install high-speed commercial EV charging stations at public rest stops, arguing that drivers recharging a battery need a safe, well-lit place to park for thirty to forty-five minutes.

Off-ramp truck stop operators, however, vehemently oppose this, arguing that selling electricity to motorists is fundamentally no different than selling gasoline or diesel. If a state installs private, revenue-generating fast chargers within the highway right-of-way, it directly undercuts the private gas stations and travel plazas off the ramps that are investing heavily to install their own EV chargers on private land.

The irony, of course, is that while these trade groups fiercely guard their exclusive right to sell roadside electricity in the future, rural off-ramp businesses have been notoriously slow to make the expensive electrical upgrades to install them today, leaving EV drivers stranded in the crossfire of corporate territory-marking.

Seventy years after Congress drafted the Federal-Aid Highway Act, the central philosophy of Section 111 remains intact. Whether it is a double cheeseburger, a hot cup of coffee from a food truck, or 150 kilowatts of electricity, federal law still ensures that if you want to spend money on the road, you have to hit the brakes, take an exit, and enter the private economy.