This paper describes the modernizing, civilizing, and democratizing tasks assigned to highways, as well as their unexpected consequences and unforeseen usages. After World War II, American funds and expertise were used to build a highway network across Turkey, which facilitated an unprecedented sense of mobility, and captured the imagination of American and Turkish modernization theorists alike. I draw upon parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, and engineering journals to show how scholars, experts, and officials on both sides of the Atlantic construed the provision of roads to the Turkish countryside, as a civilizational necessity, one that would enhance economic development, education, and access to an “open society.” The proponents of the program believed that roads would grant access to otherwise remote corners of the nation, especially areas populated by Kurdish minorities, and that highways would shrink distances between different parts of the country, and thus allow its subjects to participate in a shared national space and economy. While the beneficiaries were expected to imagine themselves as part of a unified nation consisting of modern subjects, the impact of roads, maps, and buses often exceeded the intentions of their providers and overflowed their expectations. Modernist visions of the highway system providing a path to a prosperous and open future were thus frustrated by local mistranslations, material roadblocks, and the misuse of vehicles and equipment, opening the very category of the modern up to contestation, appropriation, and redefinition.