ACQUISITION OF RIGHTS-OF-WAY
The greatest single impediment to the timely realization of desirable road improvements has been the difficulty of acquiring the necessary rights-of-way. Too often in the past the character of road improvements undertaken has been governed by the limitations of shortsighted land-acquisition measures. When the acquirement of land is postponed, as usually it has been, until the very moment of need for construction purposes, it is often discovered that the land actually wanted cannot be obtained without long delay. Time pressing, plans are altered to require less or more-available land, and in the end it is often found that for such inadequate takings too much has been paid. Every condition leads to ill-advised and uneconomic compromise.
The causes of these conditions are mainly two: one, the failure to plan and provide funds for land purchases sufficiently in advance of the occasion for road construction, and the other the cumbersome and time-consuming land acquisition processes prescribed by the laws of most of the States. If work on the interregional highway system is to supply the post-war employment of which it is capable, and if design of the system improvements is to be unwarped by right-of-way compromises, both of these causes must be clearly recognized and remedied.
Funds for advance acquisition of right-of-way.—The Federal Government has already made generous provision in the Defense Highway Act of 1941 and the recently enacted Public Law No. 146, Seventy-eighth Congress, for the survey and advance planning of highway construction projects. This provision can be, and is being employed for planning of improvements on routes conforming to the interregional system. With similarly adequate planning provision by the States, and their subdivisions, the further need in remedy of the first of the causes mentioned is the early and sufficient appropriation of immediately expendable funds for acquisition of the necessary lands and rights-of-way. For this purpose the amendment of the Federal Highway Act by Public Law No. 146 is ineffectual.
Revision of land-acquisition laws.—A complete remedy for the second of the causes referred to will require the more difficult revision of legally established methods of public land acquisition in many States.
In 55 jurisdictions examined, the Committee has found that there are no less than 320 such methods in present use, with nothing inherent either in the nature of the governmental units exercising the power or in the public uses for which lands are acquired to require such varied treatment. The common defect of the majority of these varied methods is that they postpone the public possession of required lands until the compensation due private owners has been determined by processes which involve many possibilities of legal delay and obstruction.
Fortunately, however, there are among the methods in use a few, recently developed and closely similar in their essential requirements,
