Wooden Wheels on cars were a natural evolution for Cars and Trucks coming from Covered wagons and Buckboards and Carriages for hundreds of years

 It wasn't until most roads were paved with cement or asphalt where it was even practical to have metal wheels on cars and trucks. Wooden wheels can survive more bumps and shocks than metal wheels can on a constant basis.

However, once cars drove much past 25 miles per hour regularly it wasn't safe really to have wooden wheels on them. So, once race cars all had all metal wheels except for the tires it wasn't long before most cars and trucks had metal wheels too.

However, to get there there needed to be paved roads between cities in the U.S. which didn't happen overnight either.

Then in the 1950s President Eisenhower invested in Freeways (superhighways) all over the U.S. so people could quickly evacuate cities during the threat of nuclear war if cities were targeted so the basic population could survive if they chose to evacuate. We hopefully now are over the danger of nuclear war (not sure) but we still have the Freeways and Superhighways that Eisenhower began building to evacuate the populations to the country where they could better survive a nuclear holocaust in their areas.