America's Highways 1776–1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program/Part 1/Chapter 10
Highway
Boom
“. . . but each separate project [new road] is to some community a new opportunity, a means of bettering, in some respects, the economic and social status of the community, and together they form the links which, eventually united, will constitute a new means of transportation. . . .”
The Beginning of a Sustained Highway Program
The Federal Highway Act of 1921 increased the limit of Federal participation in road costs to $20,000 per mile, a change that had been urged by the eastern and northern States to compensate for the wartime inflation in the cost of the higher types of road pavements. When Congress again considered the financing of the Federal-aid program in April 1922, this limit became a bone of contention. Rural interests wanted the limit cut back to as low as $4,000 per mile to force the States to use the less expensive construction types and, thus, more rapidly provide some kind of improvement for the entire Federal-aid system, and particularly its less heavily traveled parts. Eventually, a compromise was reached on a limit $16,250 per mile for projects funded in fiscal year 1923, falling to $15,000 per mile in 1924 and thereafter.[N 1]
This was only a minor setback for Federal aid. Much more important was Congress resumption of the desirable practice of authorizing aid funds several years in advance by authorizing appropriations of $50 million, $65 million, and $75 million for fiscal years 1923, 1924 and 1925. Since most State legislatures met biennially, this advance notice of Congress intent was of the utmost importance to the States in planning their own matching appropriations and budgets.
This removal of uncertainty in the Federal-aid program coincided with a drop in wages and a lowering of price levels for construction materials. The State highway departments, profiting from their past mistakes and added experience, had developed much more effective construction organizations and procedures, and these were matched by a stronger and more efficient construction industry. The result was the completion of 10,247 miles of construction at a cost of $189 million—3½ times as much as had been accomplished since the Federal-aid program began—in the single fiscal year of 1922. To Chief MacDonald the mere recital of statistics could not possibly convey an adequate idea of what was accomplished. In 1922 he wrote:But merely to say that this year has added 10,000 miles to the previously existing mileage conveys no adequate sense of the far-reaching effects of the work that is being done. The 10,000 miles completed represent something more than the equivalent of three transcontinental roads. They are not transcontinental roads. They are not even connected roads, though as the work continues they will be connected ; but each separate project is to some community a new opportunity, a means of bettering, in some respects, the economic and social status of the community, and together they form the links which, eventually united, will constitute a new means of transportation, no less important to the country as a whole than that offered by the railroads.[1]
Roadbuilding by Stages
The 1922 record was possible mainly because at least two-thirds of the work was of low type, such as graded earth, sand-clay and gravel, and this in turn came about because the BPR adopted a stage construction policy in the early years of the Federal-aid program:In many instances it has been found advisable to grade and drain a road and delay an expensive pavement until a later time. This policy will be continued under the same conditions: that is, when the volume of traffic at the time of the original construction is not large enough to require any better surface than can be built of selected soil, sand-clay, or gravel, when financial considerations require that the expense of a pavement be deferred, and when, as in the light of past experience it has often been found advisable, a delay to allow the subgrade to become stable is believed to be necessary. In such cases the plan will be, as it has been in the past, to so design and construct the grades and drainage structures and whatever temporary surfacing that is applied, that any additions or subsequent improvements can be made without loss of prior investment.[2]
Most of the stage construction projects were in the West, the Prairie States and the South where traffic was light and roadbuilding was least advanced. The intention to build by stages was set forth in the project agreement, or contract between the Government and the State, and only a portion of the Federal share of the cost of the project was paid upon completion of the first stage; the rest was held back until the final stage was finished. As traffic increased, the State upgraded the initial construction with better surfaces, but these second stage projects did not become an appreciable part of the total Federal-aid program until about 1926, when 11 percent of all mileage improved was second stage. By 1933, however, 55 percent of the mileage was in this category.
The basic concept of stage construction was good, but it failed to take into account the enormous increase in vehicle ownership and road traffic that would occur during the 1920’s, or the rapid evolution in highway engineering. In the 5 years or so that elapsed between original and second stage construction, many States changed their ideas as to what were adequate or desirable standards. Instead of following the original plan for the second stage, they upgraded it, and in many instances made minor relocations to eliminate sharp curves.[N 2] Thus, the stage construction, or “wait and see” approach, resulted in abandoning some of the original construction, but also avoided premature investment in high-type work that would later have proved inadequate.
The stage construction policy accomplished its purpose which was to give the poorest portions of the Federal-aid system a modest improvement as soon as possible. This philosophy was well expressed by Chief MacDonald in his annual report for 1926:
An exactly similar policy was followed by the builders of the railroads, whose first object was to ‘get the traffic through,’ leaving until a later date the perfecting processes of ballasting, banking of curves, etc. It is the only satisfactory method of dealing with the conditions existing in many of the Southern, Middle Western, and Western States in which there are thousands of miles of main road still entirely devoid of any improvement whatever.[3]
However, not everyone agreed with this policy, and some influential critics asserted that the Federal aid was being frittered away in low-grade work that would never handle the traffic. They pointed to the original Federal Aid Boad Act of 1916 which required that “The Secretary of Agriculture shall approve only such projects as may be substantial in character.” To these critics MacDonald replied:
In interpreting the word ‘substantial’ the Secretary has taken cognizance of the fact that an improvement which is substantial for one density and kind of traffic may not be substantial for another. It has been recognized that the types of roads which it is desirable to construct in New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are not suitable or necessary for Nevada, Idaho, and the Dakotas . . . the decision as to the type of road which the Secretary will approve for a given locality has been based in every case upon the traffic which is using the existing road and which it is estimated will use the improved road . . . The result is that the Secretary has approved roads of all types and widths, from graded earth roads to concrete, brick, or bituminous concrete, narrow as well as wide; but the essential point is that in each case the decision has been based upon the best engineering judgment of the Federal Government and the several State highway departments, which between them employ the most highly capable highway engineers in the country.[4]
The 1916 Act permitted spending Federal-aid funds on practically any rural post road. Director Page and, later, Chief MacDonald tried to focus the aid on the main intercity and intercounty roads, but inevitably, because of the realities of local politics, a number of roads of only local importance were improved. These failed to pass the test for inclusion in the 7 percent system, but the States, under their contracts with the Government, were still obliged to maintain them. To relieve the States of this burden, the Government permitted them to pay back the Federal share of the cost of these roads and then turn them back to the counties for maintenance. This process began in 1924 and by 1933, 1,526 miles had been relinquished.
Stage construction was little used by the eastern and northern States. Their federal-aid mileage was already largely improved with dustless pavement, thousands of miles of which had been severely damaged by trucking during the war. Their problem was to reinforce their roads to carry heavy motor trucks, and for this they chose concrete or brick pavements, not only because of their generally excellent service during the war, but also because they were considered “permanent” and, therefore, suitable for bond financing. With a few notable exceptions, these costly new pavements were laid within the existing rights-of-way, and, thus, perpetuated the faults of poor alinement and grade that existed in the old roads.
Getting the Traffic Through and Paying the Highway Bill
Within 5 years of the debacles of 1920 and 1921, the States had increased their capacity for roadbuilding to the point where they were able to obligate $100 million of Federal aid per year.[N 1] By 1929 they had improved 90 percent of the Federal-aid system, or about 170,000 miles, to some degree, at least, by adequate grading and drainage. A little less than half of this mileage, some 79,000 miles, was improved with Federal aid and State matching funds; the rest with State and local funds alone.[5]
This record was made possible not only by improved organization and management, but also by a rapid increase in the highway revenues of all the States. The increase was accompanied by a shifting of much of the highway tax burden from real property to the road user.
In 1921 there were 10.5 million motor vehicles registered in the United States, and the owners of these vehicles paid $122.5 million to the States in road-user taxes.[N 2] This was about one-third of the total State expenditures for construction. The rest came from Federal aid and general State revenues.
- ↑ From fiscal year 1925 to fiscal year 1929, the regular Federal-aid appropriations were $75 million per year, so this rate of obligation was possible only because of the unused backlog of appropriations from earlier years. This backlog was used up in 1928.
- ↑ The gasoline tax, first imposed by Oregon in 1919, was still a minor source of revenue in 1921, amounting to only $5.4 million. By 1929 fuel taxes were $430.2 million, or 56 percent of all revenues from road users.
With more and more cars being sold, the automotive industry favorably affected the national economy by requiring more materials and services for the traveler and his car.
By 1929 the number of vehicles had increased 2½ times, to 26.5 million, but State highway revenues had increased over 6 times, to $763.4 million, and the percentage of the highway burden carried by road users had risen to over 99 percent. Actually, when Federal aid is considered, the road users paid about $81 million more than the cost of building and maintaining the State highways. Some of this excess was spent for nonhighway purposes, but most of it was distributed as aid to the counties and townships.[6]
Impact of the Motor Vehicle
The period from 1921 to 1929 was one of rising prosperity, paced by the automobile industry which not only increased its production astonishingly, but also improved the vehicles while reducing prices. In the early 1920’s the industry introduced installment sales on a large scale and strengthened the secondhand car market. As a huge mass market for automobiles burgeoned, sales increased from 1.6 million units in 1921 to 4.0 million in 1923 and 5.3 million in 1929, valued at $3.4 billion. Motor vehicle manufacture became a major industry which, in 1929, employed 471,000 people.
Automobiles affected the national economy in innumerable ways. They greatly expanded the market for steel, glass, rubber and fuel. Thousands of garages and service stations sprang up along the new roads to care for the motorists’ needs. Auto touring had its impact on the travel business, spreading tens of millions of dollars throughout the country. New automobile factories, garages, tourist facilities and the large road and street programs helped to fuel the already imposing construction and business boom of the twenties.
The proliferation of motor vehicles also had its dark side. As millions of new drivers took to the roads, traffic accidents increased by leaps and bounds, their cost reaching nearly $1.3 billion by 1929. Highway fatalities more than tripled, from 10,723 in 1918 to 31,215 in 1929.[7]
On the streets of the larger cities, traffic congestion became unbearable. Police and city engineers tried frantically to keep traffic moving by instituting one-way street schemes, by developing automatic traffic signals and by assigning the right-of-way to arterial traffic with the innovative stop sign. One of the simplest and most effective measures for expediting traffic movement was by cutting back curb corners at intersections from the customary 4- or 5-foot radius to 12 or even 15 feet. This permitted vehicles to make right turns without swinging into the adjoining lane and greatly smoothed traffic flow.
With the increase in traffic and highway-related business, long “string towns” developed along the approaches to every city, and advertising signs by the thousands proclaimed the virtues of innumerable products and services to growing captive audiences. Because of these roadside activities, new highways became congested and dangerous within a few years of opening, creating demands for by-passes.
The increasing popularity of cars and automotive travel also had its dark side.
The Private Toll Bridge Menace
As interstate roads were completed and connected with each other, the growing stream of traffic attracted another class of highway parasite—the private toll bridge promoter. By 1928, private bridges were becoming a serious threat to the free use of the highways. In 1928 alone, Congress granted 75 franchises for private toll bridges over interstate waters and the States issued many others. Most of these were stock promotion projects, giving favored cliques a strangle hold for years on key sites on the main highway arteries on terms inadequate to protect the public interest.
Chief MacDonald spoke out against this trend at the 1928 AASHO meeting:
Private toll-bridge Interests are becoming bolder and obstructing the public’s business. They are attempting to defeat legislation unfavorable to themselves and are obstructing the efforts of highway departments to carry on State projects.
*****
There is much confusion in the public mind on this question. In all sincerity many have endorsed the private toll bridge franchise on the theory that it is desirable to have bridges, and if the public funds are not sufficient or available, rather than do without, it is better to grant a toll franchise to private interests. This is not the issue . . . The real question is the very simple one of whether it is sound public policy to grant the right to collect a private profit from the user of the highway. The answer ought to be a vigorous and authoritative ‘No.’ There is no place on the public highway today for the privately owned toll bridge.[8]
MacDonald was not against toll bridges as such, but he thought they should be owned and operated by the State or other public authority and freed from toll as soon as the bonds were paid off. This type of financing had been provided for by Congress in an act approved March 3, 1927, which permitted Federal-aid funds to be used on publicly owned toll bridges on the Federal-aid system. Such financing had also been adopted by the Port of New York Authority for four monumental and costly bridges, including the immense George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River.
Farmers in Paneytown, Ark., ford stream to avoid the fee on a private toll bridge.
A toll house at the approach to a publicly owned and operated bridge on U.S. 1 in South Carolina, 1921.
The motor road on a closed right of way takes on the characteristics of a railroad. A highway cannot be so transformed and continue to serve in a universal way. . . . If de luxe service roadways to a limited extent are needed on private rights of way their development should be , undertaken by the existing railways, not in competition with them. Much harm without compensating bene- fits will otherwise result. Once let franchises be granted to private interests with the necessary power of eminent domain, and inconceivable harm would result to the financial structure of the railways in that area.[9]
Railroads Versus Highways
The steam railroads experienced a remarkable recovery from the postwar doldrums in 1921.[N 1] Even so, their net operating revenue for that year returned them only 3 percent on their investment—not enough to cover fixed charges.[10] Some railroad executives blamed the failure to make a better showing on truck competition, which, they claimed was “subsidized” by the free use of public highways paid for, in part at least, by the railroads’ own property taxes. Some railroads mounted a publicity campaign to protest the “unfairness” of this subsidized competition, and their arguments were given some substance by President Harding’s December 1922 address to Congress in which he said that motor haulage would be wasteful if burdened with its proper share of the highway cost.[11]
However, there were realists in the railroad industry who realized that trucks and improved highways had come to stay and that the railroads would have to accommodate them. One executive said flatly that low-volume unprofitable branch railroads should be replaced by truck lines and that trucks could help the railroads by collecting and delivering carload freight for long hauls.[12] In the east a number of railroads made determined efforts to reclaim the short-haul business from the trucks, but these efforts were only partly successful. Practically all hauls under 30 miles were gone for good, but the railroads were able to get back a good part of the over-70-mile business, at least temporarily.
For the electric railroads, highway competition was disastrous and eventually fatal. In the early 1920’s, few States regulated buses as common carriers, and bus and stage lines sprang up by the hundreds, competing fiercely with each other for business.[N 2] These operated over most of the roads radiating out from the cities, reaching hundreds of rural families who were not served by the electric railroads. However, many buses ran in direct competition with the interurban lines on parallel roads, carrying both passengers and express.
By 1923 interurban buslines were operating pneumatic-tired vehicles that would carry 30 passengers and some even 60 passengers in relative comfort at fares of about 4 cents per mile, which closely approximated the rates charged by steam and electric railroads. For the convenience of both passengers and buslines, the business interests in many cities, small as well as large, organized terminal associations to provide waiting rooms and other terminal facilities for the convenience of the public.[13] Through competition between themselves and financial mergers, the buslines rapidly became formidable competitors of both the steam and electric railroad lines for passenger traffic, and by 1930 most of them were placed under State regulation as common carriers.
Buses were not the only competitors for passenger traffic. Rapidly increasing motor car ownership was equally damaging to the railroads, and by the end of the 1930’s, most of the electric railroads were in receivership. So rapid was the obsolescence and decline of this form of transportation that some of these were only 20 years old when they ceased operation.
- ↑ The Government returned the railroads to their owners in 1920.
- ↑ There was a short-lived parallel trend in the cities where unregulated “jitneys” made huge inroads into street railroad revenues with their flexible routings and cut-rate fares. The usual fare was 5 cents, or “one jitney” in current slang, hence the name. Jitneys were clearly in violation of the traction companies’ charters and were eventually outlawed by most cities, along with competing intracity buslines.
Heavy Trucks Shake the Foundations of Highway Engineering
Up to 1917, the main problems of highway engineers were financial, not technological. Roadbuilding was an established art practiced essentially according to the precepts laid down by Tresaguet, Telford and McAdam more than a century earlier. The principal innovation, and perhaps the earliest application of research to roadbuilding, was the successful development of bituminous surfaces in the early 1900’s to combat dusting. The roads built prior to World War I were narrow and thin, but they were adequate for automobiles and farm vehicles.
This feeling of technological well-being came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1918 with the widespread failure of roads of all types under heavy trucking. Prevost Hubbard, the BPR’s chief chemist and expert on bituminous pavements described the disaster as follows:
Hundreds of miles of roads failed under the heavy motor-truck traffic within a comparatively few weeks or months. Roads with bituminous surfaces, bituminous macadam roads, and bituminous concrete roads all failed alike, together with other types used in State and county work. These failures were not only sudden but complete, and almost overnight an excellent surface might become impassable . . . A very large proportion of the failures have been characterized by an almost simultaneous destruction of the entire road structure, and not merely the disintegration of the wearing course or pavement proper.[14]
Director Page made the investigation of these massive failures his first order of business for 1918. He sent the OPRRE experts into every part of the country to investigate and report. Highway Engineer J. L. Harrison found two kinds of failure in Illinois and Ohio. One was failure of the base due to overloading of a frost-softened subgrade, such as Hubbard described, resulting in sudden and complete failure. The other was internal failure of macadam bases due to pressures high enough to crush the stone particles. Harrison found failure by internal crushing in macadam bases as thick as 18 inches near Chicago. In Wayne County, Michigan, he found that thin concrete pavements had broken up so badly that they had to be resurfaced, but that those which were made 7 or 8 inches thick had withstood heavy trucking with little damage.
Concrete mixer patching a bad spot in the roadbase (asphalt top has been removed).
Albert T. Goldbeck and F. H. Jackson of the OPRRE’s Division of Tests found that brick roads on concrete bases in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana had stood up well except where the underlying earth foundation had become softened due to poor soil or poor drainage.
All investigators agreed that pavements on sandy, well-drained soils had given much better service than those on clay soils, especially at places where drainage was poor because of inadequate ditches.
The most significant observation of all was by Harrison who noted that hundreds of pavement failures were obviously due to moisture softening clay soils, yet the shoulders had adequate slope and drainage was excellent. Some failures were on low fills where there was no possibility that surface water could have penetrated to the subgrade. Harrison concluded that these failures were caused by “non-gravitational water,” that is, water held in the soil by capillary attraction. Not only would such soils not drain by gravity; they would actually take up more water from below by capillary action due to their fine pore structure. He also declared that any theory of design (such as McAdam’s) that held that soils under a pavement could be kept dry by an impervious covering was fallacious, and therefore only soils that do not lose their strength when wet, such as gravels and sands, should be used there.
How to Manage the Behemoth
The widespread destruction of the roads by trucking inspired angry demands for limits on the weight of vehicles, and for crushing taxes on trucks to make them “pay their fair share” of the maintenance bill. However, the more thoughtful leaders, such as Delaware’s influential chief highway engineer Charles Upham, warned that the motor truck was not just a wartime phenomenon, but would be around for years after the war was over. “. . . the motor truck,” he said, “which has been developed during abnormal times has shown that it has solved an economic problem, and this solution assures us that . . . the heavy truck will be utilized for transporting freight and express within expanding limits. Therefore, . . . we must build and maintain in such a way that our roads will withstand, as permanently as possible, the demands of the future heavy truck traffic.”[15]
Upham’s viewpoint was shared by most of the State highway department heads, but none of them had a clear idea of how truck traffic might develop or how to deal with it. However, they agreed completely that legal limits must be placed on the weight of the vehicle and its load, and that without such limits there would be no way to protect the rural roads from destruction. There was a general consensus that the 5-ton capacity truck was the largest that should be allowed on the rural roads, although about 15 percent of the trucks then in existence were of greater capacity than that.[N 1] A few States had already set weight limits that would permit net loads up to about 7 tons and were planning to strengthen their roads to carry these loads.[N 2]
A load limit was one answer to the problem of heavy trucks breaking up the road surface.
- ↑ For example, in 1917 there were 55,401 trucks registered in New York, of which 8,895, or 14 percent, were of 6 or more tons capacity. Of these, 3,319 could carry 10 tons or more.[16]
- ↑ The limit in New Jersey was 30,000 pounds gross. Maryland permitted 7-ton trucks to operate but imposed a license tax of $500 on them, compared to $60 for a 3-ton truck. Connecticut restricted gross loads to 25,000 pounds on four wheels.
Spokesmen for the infant trucking industry urged the States not to strangle trucking by imposing unrealistically low weight limits. George Pride, President of the Heavy Haulage Company of New York City, spoke out against the 3-ton limit advocated by several States, which, he said, would increase hauling costs by 20 percent, as compared to hauling in 5-ton or larger trucks.
. . . either directly or indirectly, the ultimate consumer pays the cost of all transportation of the commodities he uses. If the cost of transportation is lessened by the motor truck, he gets the benefit of the decrease ; or, conversely, if it should be increased by unduly restrictive legislation, he would be penalized to the extent of the added expense.[17]
Pride recommended that gross loads of 28,000 pounds on four wheels be permitted and also that tests be made by an impartial committee to ascertain the real damage caused by trucks to the roads. He also warned:
Whatever may be the immediate limit placed upon the motor truck, it is my judgment that it must not be considered final. We are on the eve of vast developments, and requirements of the future will demand greater weights, better and different types of road beds, reduced grades, etc.[18]
In April 1918, the Engineering News-Record declared that the economic and engineering problems brought on by trucking should be faced squarely and not postponed:
. . . highways have never been investigated with the thoroughness that is necessary to prove their right to rank with the railroad or the waterway as a transportation agency . . . We are faced at the outset, then with the question whether it will pay to build better and costlier roads than any yet contemplated; whether it will pay to adopt the trailer idea . . . or whether the pneumatic tire, now being developed by at least one company for the heaviest loads, will not in the end prove the solution.[19]
As long as the country was at war, little could be done on engineering and economic investigations. However, the truck problem received a high place on the agenda for the Joint Highway Congress held in Chicago in December 1918. By resolution, that body not only recommended a thorough investigation of motor truck regulations and limitations, but also urged the States to undertake experiments on different types of pavements to develop basic engineering knowledge. The Congress, which was dominated by urban and industrial interests, also recommended that gross loads of 14 tons be permitted on the highways provided the load per inch width of tire did not exceed 800 pounds.[N 1]
Launching a National Highway Research Program
The matter was brought to a head in August 1919 by Thomas R. Agg, Testing Engineer of the Iowa State Highway Commission, who wrote in an article for Public Roads magazine:[N 2]
During the past 10 years, the transition from horse-drawn to motor traffic has been so nearly complete that horse drawn-traffic can no longer be considered a controlling factor in highway design ; yet practically all of the basic principles of highway construction were evolved for horse-drawn traffic. These have been modified from time to time as experience has indicated defects, but for the most part local conditions have been so large a factor that types and designs which have been satisfactory in one State have proven entirely unsatisfactory in another. . . .
It seems imperative that investigation in the field of highway engineering be prosecuted with the utmost vigor during the next few years, else it will be found that much of the money expended for highway improvement has not secured highways of the maximum serviceability because the design and the requirements for materials were based on unsound theories or inadequate tests.[21]
Agg then urged that the Bureau of Public Roads take the lead in a national program of highway research:
The bureau has already done a large amount of research work in this field and has trained investigators for carrying on the work and for passing on projects submitted for action . . . But most important of all, the bureau is in close touch with the highway work in the various States and is in a position to judge as to the problems most imperative of solution and to secure the assistance of the State highway departments in those problems requiring the actual construction of surfaces or structures.[22]
In a companion article, A. R. Hirst, President of AASHO, not only endorsed Agg’s proposal but pledged AASHO’s support “for this very great and necessary work.”
I agree thoroughly with Mr. Agg in his statements that the present facilities for highway engineering investigations are not adequate to meet the situation, or to develop the theories upon which the future science of highway engineering should be based. It is to my mind certain that unless the United States Bureau of Public Roads builds up a good and extensive organization to prosecute these inquiries, that nothing of value can or will be done by any other existing organization.[23]
- ↑ The 800-pound figure was recommended by tire manufacturers as the maximum economic loading for solid truck tires. Heavier loads would, they said, cause crushing of the rubber and premature failure by fatigue. At this time the widest tire manufactured was 14 inches, so the maximum load that could economically be carried by a two-wheel axle was 22,400 pounds.[20]
- ↑ Public Roads was an official publication of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It had been launched in May 1918, by Logan Waller Page as a vehicle for exchange among the States of information on methods for financing, building, and maintaining roads. By 1919, Public Roads was an important voice for the highway engineering profession and also, in effect, the journal of AASHO, which did not have its own publication, American Highways, until 1922.
Truck damage to roadways led to a coordinated national research program by 1920.
Agg’s and Hirst’s appeal set the stage for a series of events that resulted in the formation on November 11, 1920, of the National Advisory Board on Highway Research, under the auspices of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. This Advisory Board was conceived as a means of bringing together in a coordinated national research program all the various agencies and organizations involved in highway transportation and highway research. The organization of the Board was completed July 1921 with the appointment of Dr. W. K. Hatt of Purdue University as Executive Director.
As his first job, Director Hatt prepared a list of 19 “fundamental questions in highway transport,” which, he said, could not be answered without data that then were unavailable. A few of these questions, listed below, illustrate the extent of the current ignorance of fundamental highway problems:[24]
- What is the economical highway track unit for each of the several situations, e.g., intercity, farm to market?
- What is the cost of transport arising from the vehicle and from the road?
- What type of road paving should be selected for a specific transport unit?
- How should the design of the road and paving be modified to meet changing conditions of subgrade, climate, etc.? How shall subsoils be improved?
- What sum of money is the locating engineer justified in spending to avoid increase in distance, curvature, rise and fall, maximum grade, maximum curve?
- What is the capacity of a road of given width as expressed in vehicles per hour, ton-miles per year, etc.? What is the appropriate unit for expressing traffic for various purposes?
- How can the volumetric changes in roads be overcome?
- What is the economic life of various types of roads?
- What police regulations should control the use of roads?
- What principles should govern the selection of a system of roads in its various parts, as influenced by interstate, intrastate, county or local traffic?
- To what extent do social betterment, military use, i.e., social value, and other imponderables enter into highway policy?
- How shall safety be ensured on the roads?
Hatt posed these questions at a meeting of educators and industrial leaders held at the University of Maryland in August 1921 and urged “a mobilization of the efforts, of research agencies in a comprehensive program,” adding that the National Research Council would be glad to coordinate the research but would not engage in research directly.[25]
At this time the Bureau of Public Roads was the only research organization that was prepared to immediately begin work on a large-scale research program, and, in fact, it was already working on some aspects of the program. The BPR had 13 major studies underway in the field of physical research and its research budget was about one-third of the total national expenditure on highway research.[N 1] Chief MacDonald took the lead in the national program by expanding the BPR’s in-house activities and also by entering into cooperative research agreements with State highway departments and universities.
The Fruits of Research
Throughout the 1920’s, with two notable exceptions, the brunt of the research effort fell upon the Bureau, primarily because it had the only large assured income available for the costly studies that were required.[N 2]
For about 5 years, the investigators concentrated mainly on soil and pavement research to provide immediately usable information to guide the vast paving programs that were already underway. As a result of these studies, all States stopped using thin, that is, 4- and 5-inch pavements and they rapidly adopted a 20-foot minimum width for main road pavements.[N 3] One of the major fruits of the research program was a rational method of analysis proposed in 1925 by Professor H. M. Westergaard of the University of Illinois, which removed much of the guesswork from slab design.
Out of the BPR soils investigations there came a practical system for classifying soils into eight groups based on physical properties that could be measured by simple laboratory tests. This was a tremendous step forward, for it enabled the researchers to relate pavement performance to measurable soil properties and, ultimately, to predict in advance of construction the type and depth of pavement that might be required for any field condition.
- ↑ In 1920, 22 State highway departments spent about $175,000 on research and 21 colleges and universities about $150,000. In addition, the BPR spent about $150,000.[26]
- ↑ The two exceptions were the Bates Experimental Road, financed by the Illinois Division of Highways, and the Pittsburg, California, Test Track built by the Columbia Steel Company with private funds. The Federal Highway Act of 1921 authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to deduct up to 2% percent of all Federal-aid appropriations for administering Federal aid “and for carrying on necessary highway research and investigational studies independently or in cooperation with the State highway departments and other research agencies . . .” From 1922 to 1932 the sums so set aside amounted to $1.87 million per year, of which probably one-half went into research. By contrast, the States were unable to use Federal-aid funds for research, because the Government’s policy was to approve the use of these funds only for construction.
- ↑ The Bates and Pittsburg Tests showed that narrower pavements channeled traffic near the edges and caused excessive corner and edge breakage. In 1928 the AASHO recommended in its first published road standards that the minimum width of one traffic lane be 10 feet. Other considerations, such as safety and freedom of maneuver at higher speeds, also entered into this recommendation. AASHO also recommended a minimum thickness of 6 inches for concrete pavements and the strengthening of all unsupported pavement edges in its 1928 standards.[27]
Highway Planning Begins
In 1920 the Bureau of Public Roads began a series of “transportation surveys” in cooperation with the States, and in a few instances, with counties and cities as well. In all, there were 16 investigations extending over a period of 16 years. Twenty States were involved at various times with the BPR in the studies.
The first surveys were essentially traffic censuses to help the cooperating States select their 7-percent Federal-aid systems. Gradually, the studies became more and more research-oriented, and by 1925 the BPR and the States were looking into every aspect of highway transportation: the ownership of motor vehicles; the seasonal, monthly and daily variations in traffic; the types of vehicles using the roads; the origin and destination of cargoes; the size and weight of trucks and the kinds of tires they ran on, and whether they were overloaded. In the later studies, they examined driver behavior—the average speeds of drivers traveling freely on the highway and their observance of traffic laws, such as those prohibiting passing on hills and curves.
Maryland State Roads Commission testing laboratory.
Core drilling outfit taking test cores.
In Maine, the researchers discovered a historical relationship between vehicle ownership, population and traffic. By projecting historical trends ahead, they were able to make fair estimates of traffic 5 years in the future. From these predictions, the investigators placed the highways in priority groups according to traffic density, the amount of future truck traffic, and need for improvement. Finally, they suggested improving the deficient mileage to an adequate standard for the 5-year future traffic, financing the improvements with either a bond issue or an increase in the gasoline tax.[28] Following the Maine study, this kind of analysis was applied with increasing sophistication and accuracy in other States. A major improvement was the substitution of gasoline consumption for population increase as an indicator of future traffic growth.
The Cleveland Kegional Area Traffic Survey of 1927 brought all levels of government—Federal, State, county and city — together for the first time in a concerted study of the traffic problem in a single metropolitan region. The BPK which paid half of the cost of the survey, agreed to participate only on condition that the study be areawide without respect to political boundaries and that it lead to a general highway plan for the region. The study actually resulted in a 10-year improvement plan costing $63 million—a budget well within the capability of the region. The report of the survey ended with a note of caution which was to be a guidepost to future planners:
Traffic conditions, however, are constantly changing, and the recurrence of present conditions can be prevented only by careful and far-sighted planning based on a definite knowledge of these changing highway and traffic conditions. Proper highway planning must be a continuous process, based on a continuing series of facts in order that the constantly increasing traffic demands may be foreseen and met with improvements as required.[29]
The Highway Boom Continues
A decade of unprecedented national prosperity ended in 1929, although signs of a slowdown had appeared earlier. The building industry, which had been in slow decline for 2 years, went into a slump early in 1929. By late summer the building-related industries—steel, cement, lumber—were curtailing production. Automobile sales began falling, but the industry, in a runaway boom, produced 5,337,087 vehicles, a record not to be equaled for 20 years.[30]
After the stock market collapse of October 1929, deflation gained momentum as factory after factory reduced production. With a huge unsold backlog of 1929 cars hanging over the market, the auto industry cut back to 3.36 million units in 1930, 2.38 million in 1931, and 1.33 million in 1932 and laid off thousands of workers.[31] Nationally, unemployment increased from 1.5 million in 1929 to 12 million in 1932 as the gross national product dropped from its 1929 high of $104 billion to $58.5 billion in 1932.
Throughout this massive deflation, roadbuilding held up much better than other kinds of manufacturing. During the “Roaring Twenties,” the States built up their roadbuilding capability to the point where they could obligate $100 million of Federal aid per year. This rate exceeded Congress authorizations and was possible only because of the backlog of unexpended funds from the early years of the program. By 1928 this backlog was exhausted and the States began to cut back their programs to fit the authorizations, which were only $75 million per year. The slowdown became apparent in fiscal year 1929, when the completed Federal-aid mileage that year (initial construction plus stage construction) fell to 9,386 miles from its 1928 level of 10,174 miles, and it carried on into fiscal year 1930.[32]
After the 1929 crash, Congress, at the President’s request, sought to bolster the sagging economy by authorizing large sums for public works, including highways. The authorization of April 4, 1930 (46 Stat 141) increased the regular Federal aid for fiscal year 1931 by $50 million, to a total of $125 million, and authorized $125 million per year for 1932 and 1933. The Secretary of Agriculture apportioned the new 1931 funds immediately and also made the 1932 apportionments available for use in September 1930, instead of December, as in the past. This action made $175 million of Federal funds immediately available, which was more than many States were able to match, principally because their legislatures were not in session to make the matching appropriations and would not meet until January 1931, or later.
Congress met this situation by appropriating $80 million to be apportioned among the States in the same manner as Federal aid and to be used to match the regular Federal-aid apportionments. These funds were really advances to the States, not grants, and were to be repaid by deduction from the regular Federal-aid apportionments over a period of 5 years. Further, Congress required that all of these emergency funds be obligated by September 1, 1931.[N 1]
The States responded to this stimulus with commendable promptness. By June 30, 1931, they obligated $55 million of the emergency money and by August the entire amount, along with most of the regular Federal aid. Completed initial and stage construction jumped to 11,033 miles, and in 1932 it went far beyond that, to 15,997 miles.
In a small way, this highway construction helped to stabilize employment, particularly winter employment for farmers who had been hard hit by severe drought in 1930. Chief MacDonald reported that the early authorizations and the emergency loans had boosted employment on Federal-aid highway projects from 30,944 men in January 1931 to 155,466 in July 1931, while the total of all Federal and State highway employment that month was 385,349 men.[33] However, the stimulation was short-lived and by July 1932, total highway employment was only 305,372 persons.[34]
- ↑ Emergency Construction Act of December 20, 1930 (46 Stat 1030). The Hayden-Cartwright Act of June 18, 1934, converted these loans into outright grants.
Diversion of Highway Revenues—A Thorny Issue
In the early years of the Depression, there was a precipitous drop in the collections from income and property taxes. Personal income was down and destitution was widespread. Millions of people lost their life savings in the stock market crash and the wave of bank failures that followed. Drought and low agricultural prices wiped out tens of thousands of farmers who lost their farms by foreclosures and tax sales. The resulting shortfall of revenue was felt with particular acuteness by the counties and townships which had traditionally depended on property taxation for the support of schools and local roads.
Surprisingly, road-user revenues were remarkably stable. Motor vehicle registrations increased slightly in 1930 as compared to 1929, reaching the peak of an uninterrupted rising trend extending back to the invention of the automobile.[N 1] To millions of owners, the automobile was no longer a luxury but a necessity of daily existence, and sometimes gasoline came ahead of food and clothing in the family budget. The 1931 receipts from vehicle registrations and fees were only 6.7 percent below 1929, and in 1932 the yield dropped another 1.9 percent. These were insignificant losses compared to the massive deficiencies in other public revenues. The shrinkage of $26.9 million per year in revenue from registrations and fees was more than made up by a whopping $55.5 million increase in the annual yield of the fuel tax which, with registrations, gave the States an annual highway revenue in addition to Federal aid of $807 million in 1932.[36]
This huge revenue was an irresistible magnet to hard-pressed legislatures. In the words of one commentator, “. . . the motor tax has become a big red apple within easy reach, viewed with slavering lips by every agency of government.”[37] In 1932, 16 States “diverted” $82.8 million of road-user revenue to non-highway purposes, over one-half of this by New York. Diversions increased to $145 million in 1933 and $164 million in 1934; and in the decade from 1930 to 1939 they totaled the huge sum of $1.25 billion.[38]
Diversion of highway funds to nonhighway purposes began before the Depression but did not become a real detriment to the highway improvement program until about 1930. In 1916 six States diverted their entire receipts from motor-vehicle fees—some $700,000—to nonhighway purposes. When the gasoline tax became popular, diversions increased, until by 1924 they were about $10.7 million nationwide. By this time, motorists, the automotive industries, and the good roads supporters began to be alarmed by the trend. In 1928 they had enough influence in Kansas and Missouri to push through constitutional amendments prohibiting diversion of highway revenues.
Its opponents argued that diversion was unfair because it saddled one class of taxpayers—the motorists—with more than their fair share of the general expenses of government. The author of Oregon’s pioneering gasoline tax law said, “We might as well tax sugar to build roads as to tax gasoline to run the government.”[39] In particular, diversion penalized lower income families, hundreds of thousands of whom were totally dependent on automobiles and buses to get to work and back again.[N 2]
However, the most telling argument against diversion was that it was self-defeating as a means of fighting unemployment. In 1932 J. L. Harrison of the BPE traced the employment generated by the construction of reinforced concrete pavement and found that ultimately 80 to 90 percent of the total expenditure was laid out for labor and that only one-seventh of this labor was direct employment at the road site. In other words, for every person employed directly on the job, seven others were indirectly employed making cement, aggregates, and machinery and in transporting these products through the economy.[41] Dollars, therefore, were much more effective when used to build roads than when used for direct relief or a dole.
This argument was not lost on the Congress, which not only greatly increased authorizations for roads, but also declared in the Hayden-Cartwright Act of June 18, 1934:
Since it is unfair and unjust to tax motor-vehicle transportation unless the proceeds of such taxation are applied to the construction, improvement or maintenance of highways, after June 30, 1935, Federal aid for highway construction shall be extended only to those States that use at least the amounts now provided by law for such purposes in each State from State motor vehicle registration fees, licenses, gasoline taxes, and other special taxes on motor-vehicle owners and operators . . .
Only two States lost Federal money because of this Act, but it put a brake on further diversions, while the antidiversionists marshaled public opinion for a series of constitutional amendments that, along with an improving economic climate, eventually brought the problem under control. By 1942, 14 States had such amendments.[N 3]
Priming the Pump
As the national economy continued to decline, Congress applied another stimulus in the Emergency Belief and Construction Act of July 21, 1932. This Act appropriated $120 million for advances to the States to match Federal-aid funds with the proviso that the funds should be obligated before July 1, 1933. The advances were to be repaid by deduction from regular Federal-aid apportionments over a period of 10 years.[N 4]
In a number of States, this assistance was sorely needed. Many had over extended themselves during the business boom by huge bond issues secured by the State’s highway revenues.[N 5] By 1927 bond interest and repayments were an appreciable part of the highway budget in many States, amounting to $48 million nationwide; and by 1932 this figure had risen to $90 million.[45] As had been predicted by opponents of bond financing, these payments became a heavy burden, cutting into the funds available for maintenance and even for matching Federal aid.[N 6] State funds were further depleted by increased allocations of highway revenues to counties to meet the charges on their own highway bonds and to replace shriveling property taxes, by payments to the financially beleaguered cities and by diversion to nonhighway purposes, principally schools and relief.
- ↑ Registration peaked at 26,523,779 vehicles in 1930. From 1921 to 1926 registrations had increased at a rate of about 16 percent per year, but for the years 1927 to 1929, this rate dropped to about 6 percent per year. From 1931 to 1934 registrations were 24 to 25 million per year.[35]
- ↑ About 1940 a study by the Department of Commerce showed that half of all car-owning families had a weekly income of $30 or less, three-fourths had less than $40 per week and 90 percent less than $60 per week.[40]
- ↑ The Federal Government did not practice what it preached. Until 1956, it treated excise taxes on motor vehicles and fuels as general revenues not connected in any way with grants to the States for highways. From 1918 through 1930 the Federal Government collected $1.17 billion in excise taxes and from 1933 through 1936 another $1.08 billion.[42]
- ↑ These advances were converted to grants by the Hayden-Cartwright Act of June 18, 1934.
- ↑ Illinois had pioneered this method of placing the highway burden on the road users in its $60 million bond issue of 1919.[43] In 1923, the Legislature, against the opposition of business and financial interests, approved the issue of an additional $100 million of highway bonds.[44]
- ↑ To redeem its certificates of indebtedness, the Louisiana Highway Commission laid off half of its maintenance employees January 1933, replacing them with relief workers.[46]
The road contracts financed with Emergency Relief and Construction funds were the first to contain predetermined minimum wages for skilled and unskilled labor. Congress insisted on these determinations to protect labor from wage pressure and arrest further deflation in wage rates. These contracts set the pattern for other road work, and in a short time, minimum wages became standard provisions in all public works contracts.
With the change of administrations in 1933, the Government suspended regular Federal-aid authorizations and embarked on a massive program of emergency public works. The National Industrial Recovery Act of June 16, 1933 provided $400 million in grants to the States without the requirement that they be matched by State funds and instituted some notable changes in Federal road policy. For the first time, Federal funds could be spent on urban streets that were extensions of the Federal-aid highway system to and through municipalities and on “secondary and feeder roads” that were not on the Federal-aid system.[N 1]
To spread the work, Congress limited employment to 30 hours per week per worker, prohibited convict labor, and required that hand labor methods be used “wherever consistent with sound economy and public advantage.” The States were required to predetermine fair wage rates and to give employment preference to veterans.
Congress continued the emergency program by appropriating $200 million for unmatched grants to the States in the 1934 Hayden-Cartwright Act and, a year later, $200 million for highways and $200 million for eliminating hazards at railroad grade crossings in the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of April 8, 1935. These grants, with the National Industrial Recovery Act grant, pumped a billion dollars into highway construction between 1933 and 1938—enough to assure the continuation of highway building at boom levels. Altogether, the emergency funds financed over 54,000 miles of road improvements on the Federal-aid system, urban extensions and secondary feeder roads, plus the elimination of nearly 3,000 railroad grade crossings.[47]
Of equal or greater importance in the reckoning of the Administration, the emergency program provided the equivalent of 162,000 full-time jobs per year at the job site during the depths of the Depression.[N 2]
Indirect employment generated by the program was well over 480,000 full-time jobs.[N 3]
The Broadening of Federal Highway Policy
The emergency funding for 1933, 1934 and 1935 had channeled Federal money into urban areas and into secondary farm-to-market roads not on the Federal-aid system. These emergency measures became permanent Federal policy in the 1934 Hayden-Cartwright Act, which also abolished the limit on Federal payment per mile of road. In this Act, Congress resumed its practice of authorizing Federal-aid funds 2 years in advance, and also the requirement that Federal funds be matched by the States.[N 4]
This return to established Federal-aid principles locked the rather considerable Federal-aid authorizations into the 1936, 1937 and subsequent budgets and also provoked a bitter attack on Federal aid from the President. On November 27, 1937, President Roosevelt sent a message to Congress protesting that Congress practice of advance authorizations “ties the hands of the Executive” and the Budget Director and should be abandoned. The President’s message seemed merely to antagonize the Congress and strengthened its support for Federal aid. Senator Carl Hayden, the principal defender of Federal aid stated publicly that tying the hands of the Executive in the use of road funds was “exactly what the Congress intended to do.” He continued,
‘Although the President transmitted with his message the draft of a bill to change the system and repeal much of the basic highway law, there was not one Senator or one member of the House of Representatives who would even introduce the bill, and the system has continued to operate just as it is now functioning.’[50]
The Hayden-Cartwright Act permitted the States to use Federal-aid funds for plans, surveys and engineering investigations for future work, and this authority was broadened in the Agricultural Appropriations Act of June 16, 1936 to include economic investigations as well. The States could use up to 1½ percent of their matched Federal aid for these activities. This money provided the stimulus and the means for statewide highway planning surveys in every State similar to the BPR’s cooperative transportation studies of the preceding decade. In a few years, all of the States developed strong planning and research organizations which joined with the Bureau and the universities in the first comprehensive investigation of national highway problems. This national study led directly to Congress authorization in 1944 of a system of “interregional highways” within the Federal-aid system.
- ↑ The Secretary of Agriculture channeled one-quarter of the funds into urban extensions and one-quarter of the remainder into feeder roads.
- ↑ Actual employment fluctuated seasonally from about 70,000 In the winter months to as high as 336,000 in summer.[48]
- ↑ BPR studies of a decade of highway expenditures showed that, nationwide, 24.4 percent of the total highway cost was for direct labor at the job site, 50.3 percent was for indirect labor for producing materials and equipment used on the job, and the remainder reached workers in other industries stimulated by the highway investments. For high-type surfaces, direct labor on the job was only 18 percent of the total cost, but for grading work, it went as high as 43 percent of the cost. The BPR concluded, “Where hand labor is permitted to replace modern equipment the amount of improvement obtained with a given expenditure is materially reduced, and the benefit to indirect or industrial labor in cities becomes almost negligible.”[49]
- ↑ The States were required to match the Federal funds dollar for dollar except for those States in which more than 5 percent of the total area was nontaxable public domain or Indian lands, where the Federal share was larger. In Nevada, where such lands were over 80 percent of the State’s total area, Federal aid was about 90 percent of the total project cost.
In these two Acts Congress not only continued its traditional support for roads in the national forests,[N 1] but also appropriated funds for roads in Indian reservations, national parks, and unreserved lands of the public domain, and for “parkways to give access to national parks, and national monuments, or to become connecting sections of a national parkway plan . . .”
Obsolescence Overtakes the Highways
After 1921 the States concentrated their efforts on improving the 7 percent Federal-aid system into a travelable national network. As traffic became heavier in volume and faster, the States improved the highways to keep pace. They widened pavements first to 18 feet as required by the Federal Highway Act of 1921 and then to 20 feet. Some States banked the curves of old roads to make them safer and flattened the cut slopes for greater visibility. The highway departments of the public land States smoothed thousands of right angle turns with flatter curves. For the most part, these improvements were accomplished by the maintenance forces or by small contracts with State funds. But in 1929, for the first time the BPR began to approve Federal aid for “reconstruction” of roads previously improved with Federal-aid funds. By June 1930, nearly 21 miles in five States had been reconstructed, and this mileage increased rapidly in succeeding years.
The roads in the eastern and northern States, where the Federal-aid mileage had been reinforced after World War I with concrete or brick pavements, were still far from worn out by 1930 but were obsolete in alinement, grade and width, resulting in thousands of miles being rebuilt during the 1930’s. In many cases the States made entirely new locations, relinquishing the old roads to the local authorities.
As could be expected, there was no lack of criticism for these abandonments because when the roads were originally paved, it is doubtful that a relocation policy would have been possible. To begin with, in the early 1920’s, property holders would have considered it extravagant to jettison the old road and its improvements. The crying need was for durable surfacing, and most everyone thought the available funds should be spent on this rather than right-of-way and new grading. Then, too, diverting the road from its old course would have been bitterly resisted by landowners along the route, with possibly years of delay in getting the program started. For most of them, the roads were already good enough in alinement and width.
Long distance travel by road had not developed and was not foreseen. For the local movements from one town to its immediate neighbors the indirection of the old roads was not a disadvantage, but an advantage. Motor vehicles were incapable of high speed and were legally restricted to very low speeds. The desire for the present high speed had not been born in a populace still tied to its home places and regarding 30 miles an hour as a breakneck pace. The improved curvature obtainable by slightly cutting the corners of the existing rights-of-way was all that was believed to be needed, and all that could reasonably be foreseen as required in the future.[51]
By 1934 the Federal-aid system, including authorized additions, mostly in national forests and public land areas, comprised 207,231 miles; and 96 percent of it had received some kind of improvement.[N 2] But the improved sections varied widely in adequacy for traffic and in safety for road users. In Chief MacDonald’s words,
Moreover, in the effort to extend surfaced mileage the presence of defects in alignment and the generally lower standards of the earlier work had been tolerated. Bridges inherited from a much earlier period had been held in service though in many cases it was necessary to post them for limited loads and their narrow widths prohibited the safe passing of vehicles on them. Thousands of railroad grade crossings had been allowed to remain, each in some degree hazardous. All these known defects had been tolerated to advance more rapidly the first essential task of smoothing and strengthening the road surfaces to get a growing traffic through.[52]
The improvements eased the worst bottlenecks temporarily, but for many thousands of miles, it was impossible to build a really adequate road on the existing locations. The roads were simply too crooked and the rights-of-way too narrow to permit upgrading to modern standards. More and more, the States began to build new roads on new locations for high speed traffic, relinquishing the old ones to the counties for maintenance.
The locators of these new roads and the Bureau of Public Roads’ engineers who approved them held a philosophy of location that was best expressed in 1920 by Delaware’s influential chief engineer, Charles M. Upham:
In giving consideration to alignment roads may be divided into two classes, roads located within parks, and intended as scenic roads and used mainly by sightseers and tourists, and roads that can be considered as commercial and industrial roads, which would be located within and between business centers, towns and cities
In considering the alignment of commercial roads, or direct routes, it must always be remembered that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and from a commercial standpoint the shortest way is not only the most direct, but with other things equal, is the most economical; therefore, it seems to be practically conceded that ideally aligned commercial roads are those that are laid in absolutely straight lines.
Where there are costly influences entering the problem that make it impossible or impracticable to follow the straight line, then the alignment should approach the straight line, and become a compromise of line, grade, and cost of construction.[53]
This dogma dominated highway engineering in the United States for half a century, leaving a legacy of thousands of miles of absolutely straight monotonous highway.
The first centerline on a rural State highway was painted between Marquette and Ishpeming, Mich., in 1917.
Highway Safety Becomes a Serious National Problem
Aside from TJpham’s arguments, there were two main justifications for straight highways. Having no curves, they were thought to be less hazardous to drive and also practically immune to obsolescence, since a straight road can be driven at the maximum speed of which an automobile is capable. This last argument was important at a time when speed records were falling almost every year at the Indianapolis Speedway and many engineers were predicting stock car speeds of 70 or even 80 miles per hour.
The safety argument was even more persuasive. Throughout the 1920’s highway fatalities kept pace with the growth of the vehicle fleet and by 1924 had reached almost 20,000 per year.[54] Recognizing that the problem was national in scope, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover convened the First National Conference on Street and Highway Safety in Washington in December 1924. Here, for the first time, representatives of State highway and motor vehicle commissions, police, insurance companies, the steam and electric railroads, safety councils and chambers of commerce, labor unions, women’s clubs, automobile associations, automotive manufacturers, and truck and bus operators met in one place to discuss means of abating what was already a national scandal.
Committees appointed 6 months in advance reported wide differences in traffic regulations from State to State and city to city. They found “an almost total lack of systematic effort to secure accurate and complete data regard such [traffic] accidents, their types and causes, and methods of prevention.” Twenty States made no attempt to collect accident statistics. Only 8 States required that accidents resulting in personal injury be reported to the commissioner of motor vehicles or similar centralized authority, and 38 required railroads and common carriers to report highway accidents.[55]
The Committee on Traffic Control reported that high road crowns, a carryover from the earlier days of horsedrawn traffic, caused the “currents of traffic” to hug the middle of the road instead of keeping to the right. Hand signals to warn others of the intentions of drivers were not standardized, causing confusion and hazard. The Committee concluded that it was impossible to fix any safe speed limit but that traveling at a speed of over 35 miles an hour should be considered unreasonable and evidence of reckless driving. The Committee doubted the feasibility of imposing minimum speed limits on heavily traveled highways, even though failure to follow the prevailing speed was a recognized cause of accidents.[56]
The Committee on Construction and Engineering brought in a long list of inadequacies in the highways and recommended that no paved road or street should be less than 18 feet wide, or any bridge less than 22 feet wide. Rural highways should be provided with emergency off-road stopping places at intervals not exceeding 300 feet, and stopping on the traveled way should then be prohibited. Grades for primary high- ways should be 6 percent or less but might go up to 9 percent in the mountains; the minimum curve radius should be 300 feet, and a 300-foot sight distance should be provided everywhere on main highways. For safety, high crowns should be reduced and curves superelevated and widened.[57] A white centerline stripe should be painted on the pavement to indicate no-passing danger sections such as curves and hilltops, and signs warning of hazards such as curves and railroad crossings should be uniform throughout the United States.[58] Noting that 10 percent of all fatalities were at railroad grade crossings, the Committee recommended that a priority program be set up to eliminate the most dangerous crossings first.[59]
The Committee on the Motor Vehicle reported that a vehicle speed governor would be desirable but that as yet a practical one had not been devised. The most urgent safety problem facing the industry was the design of headlights that would adequately illuminate the road ahead without blinding oncoming drivers. Illumination engineers had worked out combinations of lenses and mirrors, but these compromises were difficult to keep in adjustment and were far from satisfactory.[N 1] Another difficult problem was providing adequate vision for the driver. The Committee thought that “Some device for cleaning the windshield from rain and snow, that can be conveniently operated by the driver should be available . . .” and also that “All windshields should be designed so that they can be opened to allow clear vision in case circumstances make it impossible to keep the windshield clean.”[60] This Committee also thought that vehicles should be so designed that the accelerator could not be easily confused with the brake pedal and all vehicles should have brakes capable of stopping the vehicle in 50 feet from a speed of 20 miles per hour.[61]
The Conference approved and recommended the adoption by legislative, administrative, technical and educational bodies of a wide range of measures “which, if carried out even in part, will effect an immediate reduction in the accident toll.” It also recommended that the States, as the sovereign political units closest to the problem, take the lead by passing adequate motor vehicle laws and setting up suitable machinery for administering them and for policing the highways, registering vehicles and licensing drivers. To the Federal Government, the Conference assigned the role of encouragement, assembly and distribution of information, and the development and use of good practices, leaving the achievement of uniformity to the voluntary action of the various States. Under legislative principles the Conference declared,
There is in the opinion of the Conference, a tendency to include far too much detail in legislation. This not only divides responsibility but also hinders progress toward uniformity. Laws should be so drafted as to include only those features which must be authorized by legislation, leaving the great mass of detailed regulations to be prescribed by the responsible officials whose orders should, within the limits fixed by statute, have the effect of law. There should be a minimum of restrictive laws and regulations, for the history of transportation shows that restrictive measures written without regard to economic needs have always proved a failure.[62]
For lack of reliable statistics, the Conference was unable to come to any formal conclusion as to the causes of highway accidents. However, there is little doubt that most of the delegates agreed with Secretary Hoover when he said,
It is impossible to put the whole blame for the deplorable conditions upon any particular individuals or any particular classes of traffic. If we were to analyze the facts presented to the conference as to the causes of this enormous death roll (sic) and injury we would find that incompetence, carelessness, and recklessness are the largest contributors to this ghastly toll. We would find in a lesser degree the lack of preventive measures. We would find a considerable contribution from confusion over the regulations in force. We would find also that prevention of accidents is in part involved in large problems of difficult solution in the planning of our cities, the construction of highways, and generally the handling of these new traffic problems that have been thrown upon cities and country wholly unplanned for such use.[63]
Secretary Hoover called another conference for March 1926. During the interim between this and the first conference, a special committee drew up a model “Uniform Vehicle Code” covering the registration and titling of vehicles, the licensing of drivers and the operation of vehicles on the highways, which incorporated the best features of the numerous and varied State laws then on the statute books. The second conference approved this code, recommending it to the State legislatures as the basis for uniform motor vehicle legislation.[64]
- ↑ This problem was not adequately resolved until the introduction of sealed beam headlights about 20 years later.
Highway-railroad grade crossings such as the one at left were common hazards for automobile traffic up to the 1930’s.
A year of study by another committee of the second conference disclosed that ascertaining the causes of accidents was far more difficult than had once been supposed. It was not sufficient to ascribe most of the accident problem to human incompetence, carelessness and recklessness. Even if adequate accident records were available, this committee thought a sustained program of research by a central organization, national in scope, would be needed to get to the roots of the problem.[65]
The Conference agreed, and as a result of its recommendation, the Highway Research Board (HRB) organized a “Committee on Causes and Prevention of Highway Accidents,” in May 1927 to coordinate accident research nationwide.[N 1] The HRB played a major part in subsequent efforts to reduce the accident toll.
- ↑ The first act of the Committee was to request the BPR to compile an index of published articles on highway safety and the allied subjects of highway design, town planning and traffic control. The BPR librarians found that no fewer than 2,400 items on these subjects had appeared in American and European journals for the years 1923 to 1927—certain proof of the intense worldwide concern over the problem.[66]
The First Large Highway Safety Program
The Bureau of Public Roads and the State highway departments recognized that the obsolescence of the highway system was one of the contributing causes of the high accident toll, but they were not willing to accept all or even a very large part of the responsibility:
One matter that confronts highway officials which is of great present importance and which will be of much concern in the future is the eradication of those conditions that are now or may be conducive to accident, injury, and death. A prominent part of the effort to be made to correct conditions will be the elimination of highway-railroad grade crossings . . . The separation of opposing streams of traffic on the most heavily traveled highways seems also to be essential. The greatly increased speed of motor-vehicle travel requires a general increase in sight distances and the elimination of obstructions to view at intersections. Occasional sharp curves and steep grades on highways that, in general, invite the driver to speed must not be tolerated. Provision for pedestrian travel separate from that portion of the highway used by vehicles must be made wherever the amount of pedestrian travel justifies it.
The need for corrective measures in these directions is definitely recognized and will be cared for as rapidly as available funds will permit. But this alone does not give assurance of a complete solution of our highway-accident problem, since it must be recognized that such accidents are due, in large measure, not to faults in the highways, but to weaknesses of the drivers of vehicles.[67]
Congress response to the highway accident problem was to provide increased appropriations for highways, and particularly for the elimination of grade crossings and other hazards to highway traffic. A considerable part of the $400 million granted to the States under the National Industrial Recovery Act and the additional $200 million of emergency grants under the Hayden-Cartwright Act went into safety improvements. Congress provided another $200 million for a major attack on grade crossing hazards in the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, and a further $190 million in the regular Federal-aid authorizations for fiscal years 1938 through 1943. All of these funds were outright grants and did not have to be matched by the States.[N 1]
This huge safety program reached its peak in fiscal years 1937 and 1938 when the States eliminated over 1,800 grade crossings and reconstructed over 300 existing grade separation structures at crossings. In addition, this program provided for the installation of train-activated protective devices at grade crossings with a high of nearly 1,200 devices installed in 1940.
However, the grade crossing campaign had its critics who claimed that far too much money was being spent to solve a very small part of the total problem.
- ↑ The Federal-aid authorization of June 16, 1936 required that grade crossings be eliminated or adequately protected on all future projects financed by Federal aid. This made grade crossing protection a permanent part of the Federal highway program.
Signing for Safety
Before World War I, most States were using signs to warn road users of danger ahead, particularly railroad crossings, and the railroads themselves were required to post warning signs at all public road crossings. Most States agreed that danger signs “should be conspicuous and easily and quickly read, and therefore concise; should specify the character of danger to be guarded against and should be located at such distance from the danger point as to give ample time to be acted upon.”[68] However, agreement ceased with these principles, and the signs themselves were of an infinite variety of shapes, sizes and colors.
In 1922 the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Officials recommended that its members use distinctive standard shapes for warning signs—the circle for railroad crossings, the octagon for stop, and the diamond for caution. The American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) adopted these shapes in 1924 and also the standard colors yellow for caution signs and red for stop signs, and in 1927 AASHO published the first Uniform Manual for Highway Signs. This included not only danger and regulatory signs, but also the famous black and white shield for routes on the U.S.-numbered highway system.[69]
With additional financing by Congress, highway-railroad grade crossings were either eliminated or made safer with the addition of train activated warning systems.
Meantime the American Engineering Council was making a survey of sign practices in all American cities of over 50,000 population. The Council's 1929 report was adopted by the Third National Conference on Street and Highway Safety in 1930. It was in effect a manual of the best practices of the time, including much of the practices embodied in AASHO’s manual. Recognizing that there could not be different standard practices for signing in rural and urban areas, AASHO and the National Conference organized a Joint Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices[N 1] in 1931, which in 1935 brought out a new manual for national use. This manual, periodically revised to keep pace with traffic developments, has been a powerful force for uniformity and traffic safety in the United States.
Until 1924, there was no national agreement as to uniform road signs; thus, from region to region there were an infinite variety.
The Consequences of Speed
In the early days of the automobile, legal speed limits were set far below the speeds of which most motor vehicles were capable.[N 2] Horsedrawn vehicles were numerous on the highways, and teams might bolt if they were approached or passed at high speed. High speeds aggravated the dust nuisance and accelerated the destruction of macadam surfaces. Roads were narrow—generally less than 16 feet wide—and often flanked by deep ditches so that other vehicles could be passed safely only at low speed. Finally, the vehicles, and especially their tires, were of uncertain reliability; blowouts and loss of steering control were fairly frequent, and these could be disastrous at speeds greater than 25 miles per hour.
All of these factors changed as motor vehicle ownership increased. Animal-drawn traffic decreased and became numerically and politically unimportant. Bituminization solved the dusting problem, and vehicles and tires became more reliable. Drivers, feeling safer and more comfortable, increased their speeds and were able to exert enough political pressure to have speed limits raised also.
With heavier traffic and higher speeds, it became dangerous to drive in the middle of the road, and the States began painting centerlines on the pavements to channelize traffic in lanes.[N 3] At 40 miles per hour, these lanes appeared uncomfortably narrow to most motorists, especially when passing trucks. The lane lines also caused trucks to run closer to the shoulder where they caused increased breakage of slab edges and corners. To provide greater safety and reduce edge damage, the State highway departments built wider pavements, and they also made new roads straighter. These improvements along with mechanical advances in vehicles, such as more powerful engines and four-wheel brakes, in turn encouraged even higher road speeds.
- ↑ The Joint Committee now consists of members from AASHO, the Institute of Traffic Engineers, The National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws and Ordinances, The National Association of Counties and The National League of Cities.
- ↑ In 1918 the legal limit in South Carolina was 15 miles per hour and five States had limits of 20 m.p.h. The limit in most States was 25 to 30 m.p.h., but in Kansas 40 m.p.h. was permissible. Eight States had no speed limit. In 1928, only Massachusetts still had a 20-mile per hour limit, and in 32 States the limits were 35 to 40 miles per hour. Four permitted 45-mile per hour speeds.[70]
- ↑ In 1920 Marquette County, Michigan, began painting white centerlines on curves. These lines were hand-painted with whitewash and lasted only a month on the road, but were effective for keeping drivers on their own side of the road.[71] About 1925 it became general practice to build concrete highways with a center joint to control longitudinal cracking. This joint became a visible line separating the two lanes of traffic and served the same purpose as a painted stripe.
Thus, after 1918, highway design followed a spiral of cause and effect, resulting in higher and higher speeds and wider and wider pavements. The motivating force behind this spiral was the driving speed preferences of the great mass of vehicle operators, and the public authorities were never able for very long to impose or enforce speed limits that this great mass of operators believed to be unreasonably low.[N 1]
Balanced Design for Safety
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, it was good engineering practice to locate new highways as much as possible in long straight lines or “tangents.” When it became necessary to change direction, the locator laid out a circular curve, the radius of which he selected to fit the ground with the least construction cost but which could not be less than a certain minimum fixed by department policy.[N 2] In practice, locators made the curves natter than this minimum when it was cheaper to do so, but with little consistency. Motorists driving these roads were expected to adjust their speeds to the varying radii; and on the sharper curves safe speeds might be considerably lower than the posted speed limit.
In their increasing concern for highway safety, many highway engineers worried about this inconsistency between speed limits and safe speeds on curves. One of these was Joseph Barnett of the BPR, and in 1935 he proposed that all new rural roads be designed according to an “assumed design speed.” This, he said, should be “the maximum reasonably uniform speed which would be adopted by the faster driving group of vehicle operators, once clear of urban areas.”[74] All features of geometric design—curve radii, sight distance, superelevation, even gradients—should then be made consistent with the chosen design speed so that a motorist traveling at that speed would not have to slow down to round any of the curves or ascend any of the hills.[N 3]
Barnett’s “balanced design” concept became a permanent feature of American design policy with its adoption by the American Association of State High-way Officials in 1938. In its Policy on Highway Classification, AASHO declared,
A principal factor affecting the choice of a design speed is the character of the terrain. In general, rolling terrain will justify a higher design speed than mountainous country since the cost of constructing almost every highway detail will be less. An important highway carrying a large volume of traffic may justify a higher design speed than a less important highway in similar topography due to the fact that the increased expenditure for right of way and construction will be offset by the savings in vehicle operation, highway maintenance, and other operating costs.[75]
The essential data needed to implement the balanced design concept came from a series of research studies on driver reactions, curve dynamics and vehicle capabilities which began in the middle 1920’s. By 1936 the fruits of this research were so abundantly available that AASHO appointed a special high-level committee of senior State design engineers to review the available information on highway design, bring it up to date and publish the results in usable form. Chief MacDonald assigned a small task force of BPR experts to work under this committee. Between 1937 and 1944 this Special Committee on Administrative Design Policy summarized and published all that was known about motor highway design in seven “policies.” In 1954 the Committee combined these policies into a single manual which, with later revisions, is still the final authority in the United States on rural highway design.[76]
The Parkway—A New Idea In Highways
In 1907, the New York Legislature created the Bronx River Commission and authorized it to preserve the waters of the Bronx River from the pollution of encroaching trash dumps and land fills. The Commissioners acquired broad strips of land on both sides of the river, then built a highway through the resulting elongated park. They planned this parkway as a four-lane, low-speed recreational road connecting the public parks of northern New York City with city reservoirs in Westchester County.
Originally Herman Merkel, the consulting landscape architect, recommended that the parkway be planned as two widely separated one-way roads at different levels with a wide belt of undisturbed land between them—a very advanced concept for the year 1917. He was, however, overruled by the Commission, and only two short divided sections were built.[77][N 4]
- ↑ In 1933, Maryland studies showed that in 40-mile per hour speed zones the average speed of all traffic was 37 m.p.h., and 87 percent of the drivers were traveling less than 45 miles per hour. Only a minuscule fraction were traveling as fast as 60 m.p.h. The Maryland authorities construed these findings as good public acceptance of the posted limit.[72]
- ↑ In 1912, the minimum radius in New York was 200 feet, but it was considered good practice to use 300- or 400-foot radii for curves on steep grades or at the foot of such grades.[73]
- ↑ This idea was developed concurrently by the German highway engineers in their designs for the Reichsautobahnen.
- ↑ This unfortunate result was probably caused by a popular engineering misconception that was not dispelled until the 1930’s. E. W. James, Chief of Design of the BPR, stated in 1929 that, “Two 20-foot pavements segregating traffic, with a parking between, are not adequate. Apparently two 30-foot pavements are needed to equal a single 40-foot pavement in capacity.”[78]
In practically every respect, the Bronx Parkway was different from other highways of its time. It had an unlimited right-of-way, and this relieved the builders from the need to confine their construction within a narrow band of fixed width. Furthermore, this right-of-way was also parkland which insulated the roadway from the adjoining street and highway systems and made it possible to limit access to it to a few places. All grade intersections were eliminated and trucks were excluded.
The parkway’s designers laid it out as a series of long curves connected by short tangents—not so much to make the road intentionally crooked as to follow the sinuosities of the river valley, and thus reduce the depth of the cuts and fills. They laid the grade line to fit the ground closely and varied and rounded the slopes with unusual freedom to blend into the adjacent land forms.[N 1]
The construction methods were no less revolutionary than the design. Instead of clearing everything back to the right-of-way line, the Bronx River Parkway builders saved all trees not actually within construction limits. They saved the precious topsoil, and later spread it over the finished slopes of the parkway as a seedbed for grass and plants to arrest erosion. The landscape plan was informal, blending the parkway slopes into the adjacent forest and fields.
Rapid Spread of Parkways in the New York Metropolitan Area
The Bronx River Parkway was opened to traffic in 1923. It was so popular with the people of Westchester County that they got the Legislature to set up the Westchester County Park Commission with authority to build more parkways. This Commission approached parkways from a somewhat different angle. The Bronx River Parkway had been primarily an environmental cleanup project and pleasure drive. The Westchester County Parkways, on the other hand, were deliberately planned as suburban commuting arteries by locating them through the corridors between the existing steam and electric railroads that radiated out into the county from New York City. Thus, the parkways not only moved commuters into the city, but also made additional areas of the county available for development. The consequent large increases in taxable values were more than enough to finance the very considerable costs of the parkway program. Because of the high class residential character of Westchester County, the Commissioners were careful to retain for the new parkways the high esthetic standards that had been established on the Bronx River Parkway, as well as the wide right-of-way and access control features. Their principal change in policy was to flatten curvature somewhat to permit higher operating speeds.
Commuter and recreational parkways spread rapidly throughout the New York metropolitan area and, to some extent, in and near Washington, D.C., but did not become popular elsewhere.[N 2]
Influence of the Parkway Concept on Highway Design
Parkways, designed and operated essentially as commuter arteries, were tangible challenges to the dogma expressed by Upham that there are two kinds of highways—scenic and commercial. Here were highways that were essentially commercial, transporting workers to and from their offices, and also scenic or at least attractive. The fallacy of the old position was aptly expressed in 1932 by a distinguished committee of architects, engineers and planners:
Highways traverse varied landscapes and should differ accordingly. However, we regard as unsound the common idea that they may be classified as scenic and commercial and that the appearance of the latter is of minor consequence. Scenery does not consist only of spectacular views. All outdoors is scenery of one kind or another. Therefore, wherever the rural character of the landscape has not been violated, a highway is scenic. Classification according to assumed use is no more valid. When a tourist comes to San Francisco, or a citizen leaves and enters on a holiday, the Bay Shore Highway is a pleasure road ; and when a resident of Eureka is called by his affairs to Crescent City, the Redwood Highway becomes a business road. Differing localities and circumstances may suggest different kinds of beauty, but every highway should be beautiful, with the kind of beauty appropriate to it.[79]
The principles of parkway design—the wide park-like right-of-way, control of access, elimination of grade crossings with other highways, fitting of the alinement and grade to the natural contours of the ground without using excessive cuts and fills, shaping and rounding slopes to merge them into the adjacent natural land forms, restoring natural vegetation to protect parkway surfaces from erosion, and preserving a high standard of architectural excellence for bridges and other structures—were all developed and proved out in practice before 1926. Yet these principles were almost totally ignored by the designers of other highways, which were laid out with long tangents and rollercoaster grade lines within narrow rights-of-way, with little effort to protect their steep side slopes from erosion. On these highways practically the only concession to pleasing appearance was the occasional planting of trees on the right-of-way.[N 3]
The first application of parkway principles to ordinary highways—on a very limited scale—came in 1933. The regulations for administering the National Industrial Recovery Act grants made it clear that the work done under these grants should include landscaping on a reasonably extensive mileage of roads. The States then programed 1,500 miles of roadside improvement projects costing about $2.22 million. These were mostly on main highways near cities and towns where they would provide employment and also serve as demonstrations of what could be accomplished to beautify roads.
- ↑ At this time, other highways were designed with uniform slopes, usually 1½ or 2 horizontal to 1 vertical, for economy of excavation and to stay within the narrow rights-of-way. Contractors prided themselves on dressing these slopes accurately and smoothly for a neat and workmanlike appearance.
- ↑ One reason for this lack of popularity was their high cost. The Bronx River Parkway cost $15 million for 15 miles, which included the parkland and measures to reclaim it from blight. The Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, the first parkway in the Washington area and opened to traffic in 1932, cost $500,000 per mile.
- ↑ The Amendment of May 21, 1928 (45 Stat 683) authorized the use of Federal-aid funds for planting shade trees along highways.
This program, although clumsily carried out in many localities, was an immediate public relations success. It inspired strong public support for landscaping and roadside improvement, something that had been lacking up to that time. Of equal importance, it focused the attention of the State highway departments on the enormous annual maintenance cost of correcting the damage caused by the erosion of unprotected slopes and ditches, and got them started on a long-overdue program of erosion control and correction.
The pilot beautification program also spotlighted the inadequacy of the prevailing 60-foot rights-of-way. For hundreds of miles of road, the State had to purchase additional right-of-way or obtain slope easements from property owners to provide room to repair erosion damage and to regrade the cuts and fills with flatter slopes and wider ditches. Only then could grass and protective vegetation be established to prevent future erosion. This experience led to the general adoption of wider rights-of-way for new highways, so that by 1940, 100 feet was practically a standard for main roads.
The Secretary of Agriculture’s regulations for programing the $200 million of emergency road funds authorized by the Hayden-Cartwright Act of 1934 required the States to use not less than 1 percent of their apportionments for the improvement of roadsides. By 1936, 5,000 miles of roadsides had been improved with emergency funds and with Federal aid, and most State highway departments were incorporating improved roadside design in their new projects. The BPR was able to report in 1936:
Provision is being made within State highway department organizations for an improved technical approach to the various roadside problems, and more effective methods of handling the work are being used as experience is accumulated. Only a few years ago highways were completed with little thought of the appearance of the finished roadside, and attempts were made at so-called beautification under conditions already bad and often with overemphasis on some particular kind of planting. Par better results have been produced since roadside improvement has been regarded as an integral part of highway improvement to be provided for in planning rather than as an afterthought following construction.[80]
In recognition of the increasing importance of the roadsides in highway planning, the Bureau of Public Roads established a landscape section in its Washington Office and urged the States to set up similar positions to plan and direct the roadside work.[N 1]
Congress gave a further impetus to roadside improvement in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938 by authorizing landscaping and roadside development with regular Federal-aid funds and also “such sanitary and other facilities as may be deemed reasonably necessary to provide for the suitable accommodation of the public. . .” within the right-of-way or publicly controlled adjacent areas. This encouraged the States to build rest areas along the main highways, a policy that had been pioneered in the early 1930’s by the Ohio Department of Highways.
Erosion control, landscaping and rest areas brought commercial highways and parkways much closer together in the 1930’s but the full merging of the design philosophies behind them was still 30 years away.
- ↑ The landscape planning for the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway was done in 1929 by Wilbur H. Simonson, who came to the Bureau from the Westchester County Parkways. Subsequently, as the BPR’s chief landscape architect, Simonson played a decisive part in the movement for improved roadsides in the United States.
Pittsylvania Wayside Rest Area built in 1935 on Rt. 29 near Alta Vista, Va.
A roadside park in Connecticut, 1958.
The Return of the Toll Road
Landscaping and erosion control were not the only reasons for adopting wider rights-of-way. By the mid-1920’s, the main roads near and between large cities were getting seriously congested. The easiest way to relieve this congestion was to add another lane, and several State highway departments did this extensively, despite a growing realization that three-lane roads might increase the possibility of head-on collisions. By the middle thirties, three-lane roads were practically obsolete, but hundreds of miles of highways had been widened to four lanes, especially in Cook County, Illinois, and Wayne County, Michigan.
However, these too proved to be dangerous, and many highway administrators began to believe that the only safe way to build multilane highways was to completely separate the opposing lanes of traffic, as had been done for years on city boulevards. In 1929, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, rebuilt a part of the Blue Mound Road as a “split-slab highway” with “neutral ground” between the opposing lanes of traffic, leaving the remainder with an undivided four-lane pavement. After this road was opened to traffic, the commissioners were pleasantly surprised to observe that the divided part of this highway was able to carry more traffic at 10 to 20 miles per hour greater speed than the undivided part.[81]
Despite their superior safety characteristics, acceptance of divided or “dual” highways was slow, and by 1937 there were only 1,200 miles of nonurban divided highway in the United States.[82][N 1]
In that year, Chief MacDonald reported:
The large volumes of traffic that now flow between densely populated localities have created a demand for wide, multiple-lane highways, built according to the highest standards of grade and alinement, with opposing traffic separated by a center parkway, bypassing all cities, with structures separating streams of traffic at all highway and rail crossings, and with access from side roads permitted only at carefully selected points. Such highways offer great savings in time and in vehicle-operating costs to commercial vehicles, and to the drivers of private vehicles they offer freedom from dangers of the highway and from other vehicles as nearly complete as it is possible to attain. That large volumes of traffic would flow constantly over such highways between densely populated localities there is no doubt—a traffic large enough to justify the high cost of such improvement with reasonable assumptions as to the value of the savings in fuel and time and those resulting from greater safety and freedom of travel. However it is not readily apparent how any large mileage of such highways might be financed.[84]
- ↑ The prejudice against divided highways stemmed in part from the assumption that they were not “flexible” enough to accommodate changes in the direction of traffic load. In 1922, the Lincoln Highway Association assembled a panel of the most eminent highway engineers and professors in the United States to recommend the “ideal section” for heavy traffic highways. This panel recommended an undivided four-lane concrete pavement 40 feet wide on a 100-foot right-of-way to carry 15,000 autos and 5,000 trucks per 24- hour day at a speed of 35 miles per hour.[83]
The Federal Highway Act of 1921, by concentrating Federal-aid funds on a limited mileage of the principal highways, had temporarily quieted demands for interstate highways under Federal control.
As congestion increased in the 1930’s, these demands were renewed, and they were not long in reaching Congress. Here, there was talk of authorizing the collection of tolls to finance Federal “super highways” between the principal cities—a possibility that had been considered for some time by the BPR but had been discouraged because of the large volumes of traffic required to support the high cost of such facilities.
Early in 1937, President Roosevelt summoned Chief MacDonald to the White House and handed him a map of the United States on which he had drawn three east–west routes from coast to coast and three routes traversing the country from north to south. The President asked MacDonald to get started at once on a study of the feasibility of constructing the six routes as toll roads.[85]
The basic information for such a far-reaching study was already in the files of the BPR and the State highway departments: the product of the economic and traffic studies begun in 1920. Therefore, when Congress ordered a similar study in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938, the work was already well advanced, and the BPR task force was able to finish the report to Congress by April 1939.
From their national traffic map the BPR analysts selected six transcontinental routes totaling 14,336 miles that would satisfy most of the demand for long-distance travel. After making estimates of traffic, the analysts found that only 3,346 miles—those within the influence of the major cities—would need more than two traffic lanes, and of these, only 547 miles would meet as much as 70 percent of their annual cost from tolls by the year 1960. Only one section of 172 miles, from Philadelphia to New Haven, would break even by that date.
The BPR had shown that toll financing was impractical. Nevertheless, the report pointed out, there was an urgent need for “a special, tentatively defined system of direct interregional highways, with all necessary connections through and around cities, designed to meet the requirements of the national defense in time of war and the needs of a growing peacetime traffic of longer range,” and also a need to upgrade the existing Federal-aid highways and the secondary and feeder roads.[86]
The Bureau selected a 26,700-mile system of main interregional highways which would connect all of the major population centers, and which the report recommended should be built as free public highways on wide rights-of-way, access controlled, and without grade crossings. The report went on to observe that in the past, the major obstacles to building needed highways, especially in urban areas, had been “the inadequacy of available funds and the overpowering legal obstacles that stand in the way of obtaining essential rights-of-way.”[87] Archaic laws in most States limited the lands that could be acquired or taken for highways to the bare essentials of present needs without adequate allowance for future expansion and also limited the States’ rights to deny access to abutting property owners in order to preserve a road’s traffic capacity. These difficulties were compounded by the Government’s policy of denying Federal-aid participation in right-of-way costs and the usual practice of State legislatures of providing for land acquisition in the same acts that authorized construction, so that the land was seldom available when needed.
The report recommended that Congress create a Federal Land Authority to buy and hold lands for interregional highways in advance of need in those States without constitutional authority to do so. Such lands would then be leased to the States when needed on terms that would repay the Government’s investment in 50 years. Finally, in an appendix, the report discussed the possibility of recovering all or a part of the cost of interregional highways by the resale of land acquired in excess of the amount needed for the actual construction and protection of the highways. This proposal was enthusiastically approved by the President who remarked in transmitting the report to Congress:
Under the exercise of the principle of ‘excess-taking’ of land, the Government, which puts up the cost of the highway, buys a wide strip on each side of the highway itself, uses it for the rental of concessions and sells it off over a period of years to home builders and others who wish to live near a main artery of travel. Thus the Government gets the unearned increment and reimburses itself in large part for the building of the road.[88]
This suggestion was condemned in and out of Congress as a socialistic scheme to transfer the cost of providing deluxe highways from those most benefited to the already heavily burdened landowner.
The Bureau of Public Roads’ adverse report took some of the steam out of the toll road movement, but by no means all. In December 1939, under pressure from the toll road people, eight North Atlantic States set up a committee of State highway engineers to make a more comprehensive study of the interregional route from Washington, D.C., to Boston which, the BPR report had admitted, had a marginal possibility of success as a toll road. This committee studied the 405-mile route and estimated that an adequate super highway to handle the traffic would cost $253 million, and recommended that some of the Federal strategic highway funds be used for further studies.[89] This suggestion and the report itself were buried in the gathering mobilization for war.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike
While the BPR was working on the toll road study, the State of Pennsylvania was perfecting its plans for a modern high-speed highway through the Allegheny Mountains on the right-of-way of the abandoned South Penn Railroad. In January 1936, the Legislature requested the State highway department to survey the old railroad route and report on the cost of converting it into a highway. A year later, the department reported that a highway was feasible, but would cost $50 to $60 million, much more than could be financed out of the highway budget in any reasonable period.
The Legislature then created the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission and authorized it to acquire the South Penn right-of-way and build on it a toll road to which adjoining property would have no rights of access. The Legislature was careful to stipulate that the bonds issued by the Commission would not be backed by the credit of the State. This stipulation made the bonds practically unsaleable in the depressed securities market. The project came to a standstill until the summer of 1938, when the Public Works Administration, to stimulate employment, made an outright grant of $26.1 million to the State, with the proviso that construction be completed by June 1940—an almost impossible deadline. At the same time, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation purchased $35 million of the Commission's bonds to complete the turnpike financing.
The Commission let the first grading contracts in November 1938, and thereafter pushed the construction at top speed, day and night with 155 contractors and thousands of men and machines. The 160-mile turnpike was opened to traffic without fanfare on October 1, 1940.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike was the prototype of the modern high-speed heavy-duty Interstate highway. It incorporated the most advanced practice of German and American design engineers on highway grades and curvature and was hailed by many as the safest highway in the world. It had 12-foot traffic lanes, two in each direction, separated by a 10-foot median strip. The right-of-way was 200 feet wide. The steepest grade was 3 percent, as compared to 8 and 9 percent on the nearby Lincoln Highway, and the total climb going over the mountains was only one-third as much as on the Lincoln Highway. For trucks the saving in transit time between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was 5 to 6 hours, a saving sufficient to insure the financial success of the turnpike.
Toll Parkways
While the Pennsylvania Turnpike was under construction, the Connecticut highway department was completing a modern landscaped parkway connecting with Westchester County's Hutchinson River Parkway at the New York State boundary and extending 37 miles to the Housatonic River. This road was planned partly to serve commuters and partly to ease traffic pressure on the congested Boston Post Road. From its opening in June 1938, the Merritt Parkway attracted large volumes of traffic, and within a year, it was carrying 18,800 passenger cars per day. (Commercial traffic was excluded.) Searching for a source of funds with which to extend the parkway northward to Hartford, the Legislature decided to tap this huge flow of traffic, and in June 1939, it imposed a toll for use of the road. The Parkway was amazingly profitable to the State. In its first 35 weeks of operation, 3.4 million motorists, most of whom could have used the Boston Post Road free, cheerfully paid a 10-cent toll to use the parkway's uncongested deluxe facilities. In its first 6 months, the Merritt Parkway grossed $320,644, for a net operating revenue of $280,000.[90]
Westchester County, heavily in debt for its own parkways and suffering from tax shrinkages, was not slow to notice the revenue pouring into the Connecticut toll booth at Greenwich, just east of the State line. In August 1939, the County Board of Supervisors imposed a 10-cent toll on the Hutchinson River Parkway which in 6 months grossed $279,000. However, the bonanza was of short duration, for an order from the New York Court of Appeals forced the county to stop collecting the toll and refund what had already been collected. The court held that, although built entirely with county funds, the Westchester parkways had by use and custom become arteries of the State highway system on which by State law the collection of tolls was prohibited.[91]
The Federal Highways
In most of the western States, national forest highways occupied a strategic position in the State road system. In 1920 the Bureau of Public Roads reported:
Due to the fact that the forest areas lie along the mountain summits, they contain the passes through which the important trunk highways must cross the mountain ranges, and as a consequence many forest road projects are links in important State and national highways. Within the forests are 15,000 miles of roads which form connecting links for State and county highway systems.[92]
In 1912, Congress set aside 10 percent of the receipts from the national forests as a "10-percent fund" for financing forest highways, and with this money, the Forest Service and the Office of Public Roads made a feeble beginning on the enormous task of building the most urgently needed highway connections.[N 1] This work received a much-needed boost from the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 which appropriated $10 million for forest roads for the years 1917 to 1926; and further financial support from the Post Office Appropriation Act of 1919 which provided $3 million each for fiscal years 1919, 1920 and 1921.
To spend these funds, the Bureau of Public Roads rapidly built up an engineering and construction organization equivalent to that of an average State highway department, but scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles of forests. The roads it built in the early twenties were narrow and steep but reasonably adequate for the traffic.[N 2] Much of the construction, especially in the solid rock sections, was done by station contracts under which a "station gang" of cooperative laborers contracted to excavate a 100-foot section of road:
These men attack the ledge in various ways. Sometimes they use the deep 'coyote hole,' burrowing 30 feet into the rock with a tunnel large enough to permit a stooping man to enter with a wheelbarrow. Sometimes the hole is smaller, 8 or 10 feet in depth and less than a foot in diameter. Such a hole is known as a 'boot jack.' One 'coyote hole' on the Cooks-Collins Road in Washington brought down 2,000 yards of rock with 1,700 pounds of black powder.[94]
The BPR also used modern construction equipment such as steam shovels and trucks, much of it war surplus from Army stocks, as well as millions of pounds of surplus TNT explosive in building these early forest highways.
When the States selected the 7 percent systems required by the Federal Highway Act of 1921, they included over 8,000 miles of forest highways. These roads were either entirely within the national forests or were necessary to the surrounding communities for access to and use of the forests. There were also about 5,400 miles of public roads within the national forests, but not on the Federal-aid system. These last and the roads on the Federal-aid routes the Secretary of Agriculture grouped into a forest highway system on which one-half of the forest highway appropriations were to be spent.[N 1] The Secretary concentrated 70 percent of these funds on approximately 1,000 miles of main Federal-aid routes lying entirely within the forests in order to keep pace with the improvement by the States of the adjoining portions of these routes.[96]
This policy complemented the policy of stage construction that was being followed by most of the western and southern States. To insure early completion of some kind of improvement on the principal primary routes, the Government coordinated not only the scheduling of improvements with the adjoining States, but also adopted comparable construction standards. As traffic increased, these standards were upgraded:
Meanwhile, as the traffic increases standards of construction are being constantly raised. Grades and curvature are being reduced and widths increased, and projects constructed originally as unsurfaced earth roads are being surfaced.[97]
Through the 1920's and 1930's, Congress authorized about one-tenth as much for forest highways as for Federal aid to the States.[N 2] This was applied where it was most needed to keep up with traffic, mostly for second- and third-stage construction or reconstruction, so that by 1939, two-thirds of the annual program was rebuilding or upgrading previous work. Even this did not keep up with demand, and a number of States and even counties supplied "cooperative funds" to supplement the Federal apportionments for roads of particular interest to them. Some State highway departments spent their own funds to blacktop forest highways carrying heavy through traffic. Eventually the main highways through the national forests were taken over by the States, rebuilt, and incorporated into their own highway systems.
Roads in the National Parks
Before the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, each national park superintendent reported directly to the Secretary of the Interior; each had his own road budget, and made his own arrangements for laying out and maintaining roads.[N 3] There was no overall plan for developing the national parks and making them accessible to the public, but in the annual appropriations to the Interior Department, Congress might include amounts for specific roads in certain parks, generally those with strong local political support.
In 1924 Congress gave the Secretary of the Interior general authorization to construct, reconstruct and improve roads and trails in the national parks and appropriated $2.5 million each for fiscal years 1924, 1925, 1926 and 1927 for such roads. In the same Act, Congress directed the Secretary of Agriculture to turn over 5 percent of the war-surplus road equipment and supplies to the Secretary of the Interior for use in park road construction.[98]
This act gave the Secretary the means to plan ahead, and in 1925 he had the National Park Service (NPS) prepare a 5-year plan of road improvements in 17 national parks and monuments, totaling some 1,510 miles. Since the NPS had a very small engineering staff, Director Stephen Mather arranged with Chief MacDonald, in 1926, for the BPR to handle the engineering and construction for this program on a reimburseable basis.[N 4]
Under this agreement, which, with some changes is still in effect, the NPS and the BPR built some of the most scenic and spectacular highways in North America, one of which was described thus by Chief MacDonald in his annual report for 1927:
One of the most interesting of the national-park projects is the work on the Transmountain Highway in Glacier National Park. Here is a road in which practically every conceivable obstacle has been met and overcome. The 16-foot roadway is being literally hewn out of the solid rock of the Garden Wall in order to reach and cross the Continental Divide.[99]
By 1931 only one-fifth of the 5-year program was finished, yet already some roads were in need of rebuilding to higher standards. Furthermore, the National Park Service had acquired the Colonial National Historical Park and the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains Parks in the East and had begun road programs in all of them that were ultimately to run into the millions of dollars. In January 1931, Congress authorized (46 Stat 1053) the Secretary of the Interior to build approach roads, not exceeding 60 miles long from the park gateway of isolated national parks to the "nearest convenient 7 percentum road" and required that $1.5 million of the annual park road authorizations be spent on such roads. And in 1933 President Roosevelt, by executive order, transferred to the NPS 64 military parks, national cemeteries, historical areas and national monuments that had formerly been in the charge of the War Department or the Department of Agriculture. Most of these areas had roads in need of modernizing.
- ↑ The original forest highway system as finally approved by the Secretary in 1926 comprised 13,459 miles of which 11,271 miles were in Alaska and 11 western States and 2,188 miles in 17 eastern and southern States.[95] In addition, there were thousands of miles of trails and logging roads not in the forest highway system, but necessary for the protection and use of the forests. One-half of the forest highway appropriations went to these "forest development roads."
- ↑ Forest highway appropriations for fiscal years 1917 to 1941 were $108.5 million. Federal aid in the same period was $1.1 billion. Forest highways also received a share of the emergency relief funds provided by Congress during the New Deal.
- ↑ However, for many years roadwork in Yellowstone National Park was handled by the Army Corps of Engineers.
- ↑ This informal arrangement was legitimized by Congress in the Agricultural Appropriation Act of 1928 which authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to perform engineering services for other agencies of the Government in connection with roads.
To meet all these demands, the NPS in effect jettisoned its original 5-year plan and embarked on a looser, but much larger, road program tailored to larger authorizations. Between 1930 and 1933, Congress tripled the annual park road authorizations. In 1934 and 1935, the Administration allocated $18.3 million of emergency relief funds for park roads and parkways.[100][N 1] With these funds the NPS and BPR greatly expanded their efforts, and in the single year of 1936, they completed 204 miles of park roads and 142 miles of approach roads.[101] By 1941, when the war put an end to roadwork in the parks, 1,781 miles of park roads and 255 miles of access roads had been completed at a cost of about $87 million.[102]
To some extent, roads in the national parks were demonstration roads for the embryonic State highway landscaping and erosion control programs of the 1930’s. For years before environmental design became popular, the National Park Service had employed landscape architects, naturalists and foresters to advise on the location and construction of its roads. Because of this advice, damage to the landscape from roadbuilding was much less in the parks than on State highways or even on roads in the adjacent national forests constructed by the BPR. Furthermore, the park roads were highly visible models of what could be accomplished by good slope grading and landscaping to blend a highway into its natural surroundings and control erosion damage.
The National Parkways
In May 1928 Congress instructed the Secretary of Agriculture to build a highway from Washington to Mount Vernon as a memorial to President Washington and to have it finished in time for the bicentennial of the first president’s birth in 1932. The BPR, acting for the Secretary, selected a scenic location along the shore of the Potomac River and designed a landscaped four-lane undivided highway in the style of the Westchester County parkways. No effort was spared to make this the most modern and beautiful highway in the United States:
Every possible effort is being put forth . . . to make this road one of the most attractive in North America. The alignment as designed is a succession of long, easy curves; the grades rise and fall gently with the natural roll of the hills ; the cut and fill banks will be cut to flat slopes and rounded so as to merge with the natural topograph; and the bridges . . . will be graceful flat arches faced with native stone.[103]
The BPR finished the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway on schedule, at a cost considerably above the $4.5 million originally provided by Congress. In 1930 it became the first unit of the George Washington Memorial Parkway authorized by the Capper-Cramton Act (46 Stat 482).
The George Washington and other later Federal parkways in the Washington metropolitan area became commuter arteries in the same manner as the Westchester County parkways. The Blue Ridge and Natchez Trace Parkways, however, developed along quite different lines and much closer to the original Bronx River recreational road concept.
These parkways were begun as emergency relief projects without specific authorization by Congress. After they were well started, Congress recognized them as national parkways in acts providing for their administration and maintenance by the National Park Service. When originally planned in the 1930’s, these parkways were conceived as modern motor roads with extremely wide rights-of-way—actually elongated parks sited to provide scenic views for the motorists and recreational opportunities at selected places along the way.[N 2] Thus they became not merely cross-country highways, but recreational destinations in themselves similar to the national parks and monuments.
The BPR as construction agent for the NPS let the first contract for the Blue Ridge Parkway in February 1936, and by the end of 1939, 305 miles were completed or in various stages of construction and 140 miles of continuous paved parkway were open to traffic, attracting 300,000 visitors that year.[104] The Natchez Trace Parkway developed much more slowly and by 1939 only 36 miles were completed.
Most of the Federal highways were in the national forests, the national parks or the national parkways, but there were others. In the West, considerable mileages of local roads in Indian reservations remained under Federal control after the States took over the main primaries and secondaries. Some of the larger military reservations contained well over 100 miles of roads maintained by the Army or Navy.[N 3] Over the years, the Government added steadily to its road inventory so that now almost 7 percent of the rural road mileage is under Federal control.[N 4]
The First Foreign-Aid Program
A land route connecting the countries of the Americas has been a dream of visionaries going back to Spanish times. These early schemes did not involve the United States until May 1928 when Congress, by joint resolution, requested the President to explore the possibility of an international highway at the forthcoming Pan American Highway Congress scheduled to meet in Rio de Janeiro in August 1929.[N 5] In March 1929, Congress authorized the appropriation of $50,000 to enable the Secretary of State to cooperate with other governments of the Pan American Union in reconnaissance surveys to develop the facts.
- ↑ $16.0 million from the National Industrial Recovery Act and $2.3 million from the Hayden-Cartwright Act of 1934. In addition the Civilian Conservation Corps spent tens of millions in the national parks improving minor roads and trails.
- ↑ The rights-of-way, including all access rights, were purchased by the States and transferred to the Federal Government. They averaged 125 acres per mile, but varied in width from 400 feet in tight places to as much as ½ mile at special park sites.
- ↑ In World War II an average cantonment for 30,000 men required 18 miles of primary roads, 7 miles of secondaries and 3 miles of local roads.[105]
- ↑ In 1973, 215,747 miles of rural road were under Federal control as compared to a total national rural mileage of 3,175,654 miles.[106]
- ↑ Congress was responding to a previous resolution of the Sixth International Conference of American States calling for the construction of a highway connecting North, Central and South America.[107]
These surveys began in June 1930 in cooperation with the governments of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala under the general direction of E. W. James of the BPR. In the course of the next 3 years, the engineers of the BPR and of the Central American republics covered 900 miles on foot or horseback through dense jungles and rugged mountains to make the ground reconnaissance. They were greatly aided by aerial photographs of the most promising routes made by the U.S. Army Air Corps from its bases in the Canal Zone—one of the earliest extensive uses of aerial photographic methods for highway location in unexplored country.
In January 1934, the Bureau of Public Roads reported to the Secretary of State that of the 3,250 miles of the route from the U.S. border to Panama City, 1,265 miles were already passable for motor vehicles the year round and 1,000 more were passable in the dry season and that it was entirely practicable to build a motor road over the remainder.[108]
Congress appropriated $1,075 million in June 1934 to start construction of the Inter-American Highway in cooperation with the countries through which it would pass. The BPR then worked out cooperative agreements with Panama, Honduras and Guatemala to build three large bridges. Under these agreements, the United States furnished the plans and engineering supervision, the steel and cement, and some of the heavy equipment, while the cooperating countries supplied labor and local materials.[109]
The assistance provided by Congress was little more than seed money to induce the Central American republics to improve their highway organizations and to step up their own construction efforts. This purpose was largely accomplished. On work for which the United States provided $680,000 up to 1938, the cooperating countries provided $710,000.[110]
More importantly, the BPR made a determined
effort to train engineers to carry on the work:In each country where cooperative work has been conducted, a Bureau engineer has been placed in charge as resident engineer. All other positions have been filled with local engineers, most of whom have been trained in the United States. It has been the policy to aid each country in developing its own highway engineers capable of carrying on future highway programs according to the most modern standards.[111]
In 1938 Congress authorized the President to provide technical assistance to countries of the Pan American Union for planning and building roads. Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador requested such assistance, whereupon BPR engineers were assigned as advisers to those countries in 1939. And in May 1939 the Export-Import Bank requested the Secretary of Agriculture to assign highway engineers to assist the Bank in evaluating applications for highway loans in Central and South America. This request was filled by assigning experienced BPR engineers to the Bank. These small tentative efforts provided valuable experience for the huge foreign highway-aid program carried on by the BPR after World War II.
Throughout the 1930’s, work proceeded in a rather leisurely manner on the Inter-American Highway, limited largely by the financial abilities of the cooperating countries. It required the stimulus of war to get the program really moving—a stimulus that was soon to be applied.
REFERENCES
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1922, pp. 4, 5.
- ↑ Id., p. 7.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1926, p. 2.
- ↑ T. MacDonald, Four Years of Road Building Under the Federal-Aid Act, Public Roads, Vol. 3, No. 26, June 1920, pp. 10-12.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1929, p. 3.
- ↑ Office of Federal Coordinator For U.S. Transportation, Public Aids To Transportation, Public Aids To Motor Vehicle Transportation, Vol. IV (GPO, Washington, D.C., 1940) pp. 9, 67, 76.
- ↑ Accident Facts, 1934 (National Safety Council, Chicago, 1934) p. 32.
- ↑ T. MacDonald, The Freedom of the Road, American Highways, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Jan. 1929, pp. 6, 7.
- ↑ Id., pp. 7, 8.
- ↑ Railroad Revival, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 88, No. 1, Jan. 5, 1922, p. 4.
- ↑ An Industrial Message to Congress, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 89, No. 24, Dec. 14, 1922, p. 1006.
- ↑ W. Lyford, Urges Co-operation Between Railroads and Motor Trucks, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 89, No. 22, Nov. 30, 1922, p. 933.
- ↑ G. Chatburn, Highways and Highway Transportation (Thomas Crowell Co., New York, 1923) pp. 429–432.
- ↑ P. Hubbard, Efficiency of Bituminous Surfaces And Pavements Under Motor Truck Traffic, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 10, Feb. 1919, p. 25.
- ↑ C. Upham, Solution of the Growing Problem May be Found in Cooperative Action, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 2, Jun. 1918, p. 16.
- ↑ E. Duffey, New York Advocates Placing Reasonable Limit Upon Total Load of Motor Trucks, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 2, Jun. 1918, p. 7.
- ↑ G. Pride, Limitations To Be Placed On Trucks From User’s Viewpoint, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 22, Nov. 28, 1918, p. 969.
- ↑ Id., p. 970.
- ↑ Highway Transportation Problem Needs Study, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 17, Apr. 25, 1918, pp. 798, 799.
- ↑ Ideas and Actions: A History of The Highway Research Board, 1920-1970, (Highway Research Board, Washington, D.C., 1970) p. 7.
- ↑ T. Agg, Comprehensive Investigations In Highway Engineering Needed, Public Roads, Vol. 2, Nos. 16-17, Aug.–Sept. 1919, p. 35.
- ↑ Id., p. 36.
- ↑ Id.
- ↑ Ideas and Actions, supra, note 20, pp. 185, 186.
- ↑ Id.
- ↑ Id., pp. 9, 181.
- ↑ Standards Approved by the American Association Of State Highway Officials During the Year 1928, American Highways, Vol. 7, No. 4, Oct. 1928, p. 21.
- ↑ J. McKay, The Maine Transportation Survey, Public Roads, Vol. 6, No. 3, May 1925, pp. 45–48, 67, 68.
- ↑ A Study of Highway Traffic in the Cleveland Regional Area, Public Roads, Vol. 9, No. 7, Sept. 1928, p. 152.
- ↑ 1971 Automobile Facts and Figures (Automobile Manufacturer’s Association, Detroit, 1971) p. 3.
- ↑ Id.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1930, p. 4.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1932, p. 2.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1933, p. 3.
- ↑ Motor Vehicle Registrations and Receipts, Public Roads, Vol. 12, No. 1, Mar. 1931, p. 19; Vol. 13, No. 2, Apr. 1932, p. 39; Vol. 14, No. 3, May 1933, p. 54; Vol. 15, No. 7, Sept. 1934, p. 178 ; Vol. 16, No. 5, Jul. 1935, pp. 90, 91.
- ↑ Id.
- ↑ Diversion—An Analysis of the Practice of Applying Motor Vehicle Impost Collections To Other Than Highway Purposes (National Highway Users Conference, Washington, D.C., Jan. 1936) p. 10.
- ↑ Id., p. 22.
- ↑ Id., p. 8.
- ↑ Dedication of Special Highway Revenues To Highway Purposes (National Highway Users Conference, Washington, D.C., Aug. 1941) p. 9.
- ↑ J. Harrison, Where The Highway Dollar Goes, Public Roads, Vol. 13, No. 2, Apr. 1932, p. 21.
- ↑ Off. of Federal Coordinator, supra, note 6, pp. 53, 54.
- ↑ G. Chatburn, supra, note 13, p. 330.
- ↑ Road Location by Legislature, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 90, No. 25, Jun. 21, 1923, p. 1070.
- ↑ Supra, note 35.
- ↑ Louisiana Highway Forces To Be Gut on Jan. 1, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 109, No. 19, Nov. 10, 1932, p. 572.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Reports, 1934-1944.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1936, p. 6.
- ↑ Id., p. 63.
- ↑ Save The Federal Aid Highway Principle — The Story of What It Is, How It Operates and The Attacks Against It (National Highway Users Conference, Washington, D.C., Mar. 1942) p. 31.
- ↑ Toll Roads and Free Roads, H. Doc. 272, 76th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 107.
- ↑ T. MacDonald, Federal Aid From The National Viewpoint, The History and Accomplishments of Twenty-Five Years of Federal Aid For Highways (American Association of State Highway Officials, Washington, D.C., Nov. 28, 1944) p. 29.
- ↑ C. Upham, The Alignment, Grade, Width, And Thickness In Design Of Road Surfaces, Public Roads, Vol. 2, Nos. 21–22, Jan.–Feb. 1920, p. 25.
- ↑ Accident Facts, 1927 (National Safety Council, Chicago, 1928) p. 6.
- ↑ Report of The Committee On Statistics (National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, Washington, D.C., Nov. 3, 1924) pp. 7, 21, 26, 27.
- ↑ Report of The Committee On Traffic Control (National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, Washington, D.C., Nov. 3, 1924) pp. 9, 10, 14.
- ↑ Report of The Committee On Construction and Engineering (National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, Washington, D.C., Nov. 3, 1924) pp. 5-7, 12.
- ↑ Id., p. 23.
- ↑ Id., p. 15.
- ↑ Report of The Committee On Motor Vehicles (National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, Washington, D.C., Nov. 3, 1924) pp. 9, 14.
- ↑ Id., p. 12.
- ↑ Report of The First National Conference On Street and Highway Safety, Washington, D.C., Dec. 15–16, 1924, p. 15.
- ↑ Id., pp. 9, 10.
- ↑ Report of The Second National Conference On Street and Highway Safety, Washington, D.C., Mar. 23–25, 1926, p. 15.
- ↑ Id., pp. 19.
- ↑ A. Fletcher, Report of the Committee on Cause and Prevention of Highway Accidents, Proceedings, 7th Annual Meeting, Vol. 7, (Highway Research Board, Washington, D.C., 1928) pp. 43, 44.
- ↑ BPR, supra, note 48, p. 10.
- ↑ Mark Brooke, Sidewalks, Curbs, Gutters and Highway Signs, American Highway Engineer's Handbook, A. H. Blanchard, ed. (Wiley, New York, 1919) p. 1393.
- ↑ A. E. Johnson, A Story of Road Signing, AASHO—The First Fifty Years, 1914-1964, (American Association of State Highway Officials, Washington, D.C., 1965) pp. 130, 131.
- ↑ A. Bruce, Effect of Increased Speed of Vehicles on the Design of Highways, Public Roads, Vol. 10, No. 1, Mar. 1929, p. 11.
- ↑ K. Sawyer, Line Controls Country Roads Traffic, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 85, No. 18, Oct. 28, 1920, p. 833.
- ↑ A. Johnson, Notes on Traffic Speeds, Proceedings, 13th Annual Meeting (Highway Research Board, Washington, D.C., 1934) p. 353.
- ↑ W. Harger & E. Bonney, Handbook For Highway Engineers (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1919) p. 33.
- ↑ J. Barnett, Safe Side Friction Factors and Superelevation Design, Proceedings, 16th Annual Meeting, Vol. 16 (Highway Research Board, Washington, D.C., 1936) p. 75.
- ↑ A Policy on Highway Classification, Approved September 16, 1938, Policies On Geometric Design (American Association of State Highway Officials, Washington, D.C., 1950) p. 8.
- ↑ A Policy On Geometric Design of Rural Highways (American Association of State Highway Officials, Washington, D.C., 1954).
- ↑ G. D. Clarke, The Parkway Idea, The Highway and The Landscape, W. B. Snow, ed. (Rutgers Univ. Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1959) pp. 39, 40.
- ↑ E. James, Parkway Features of Interest to the Highway Engineer, Public Roads, Vol. 10, No. 2, Apr. 1929, p. 22.
- ↑ I. F. Morrow, Report of the Section on Architecture of the Commonwealth Club of California, The Commonwealth, Vol. 8, No. 46, Nov. 15, 1932, p. 245.
- ↑ BPR, supra, note 48, p. 11.
- ↑ Editorial, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 103, No. 20, Nov. 14, 1929, p. 757.
- ↑ B. Marsh, Discussion on Design Research, Proceedings, 17th Annual Meeting, Vol. 17 (Highway Research Board, Washington, DC, 1938) p. 253.
- ↑ W. Thompson, Design Features of Lincoln Highway “Ideal Section,” Engineering News-Record, Vol. 88, No. 24, Jun. 15, 1922, p. 982.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1937, p. 4.
- ↑ As related in January 1974 by E. H. Holmes of the BPR, a member of the task force that prepared the Interregional Highway Report.
- ↑ H. Doc. 272, supra, note 51, p. 4.
- ↑ Id., p. 114.
- ↑ Id., pp. VII, VIII.
- ↑ Boston-Washington Super Highway, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 126, Apr. 10, 1941, pp. 550, 524.
- ↑ Tolls on Merritt Parkway Paid By 3½ Million Cars, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 124, No. 11, Mar. 14, 1940, p. 360.
- ↑ Toll Collection Void on Western Parkway, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 124, No. 10, Mar. 7, 1940, p. 353.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1920, p. 20.
- ↑ L. Hewes, Federal Road Building in the National Forests of the West, Public Roads, Vol. 3, No. 26, Jun. 1920, pp. 15, 25, 26.
- ↑ Id., p. 26.
- ↑ BPR, supra, note 3, p. 30.
- ↑ Id.
- ↑ Id., p. 31.
- ↑ Authorization of Road Construction in National Parks (43 Stat 90).
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1927, p. 32.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1935, p. 51.
- ↑ BPR, supra, note 48, pp. 58, 61.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1941, pp. 71, 72.
- ↑ BPR, supra, note 5, p. 42.
- ↑ History of the Blue Ridge Parkway Project, Typescript of unknown authorship, dated April 2, 1940, in the files of the National Park Service, Denver, Colorado.
- ↑ Road Builders Annual Meeting Centers on War Restrictions, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 128, No. 11, Mar. 12, 1942, p. 393.
- ↑ Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics, 1973 (Department of Transportation, Washington, D.C., 1974) p. 210.
- ↑ BPR, supra, note 5, pp. 42, 43.
- ↑ Proposed Inter-American Highway—Report Prepared By The Department of Agriculture Transmitted To The Secretary of State, S. Doc. 224, 73d Cong., 2d Sess., p. 13.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1934, p. 53.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1938, p. 63.
- ↑ Id.