taxes and from the Federal Treasury. The purpose of State and Federal road agencies was to use these revenues to extend as rapidly as possible a useful measure of improvement to the entire selected mileage of main roads and thus to narrow as quickly as practicable the wholly unimproved gaps.
The measure of improvement considered necessary was usually less than the costly ideal which, by consuming much revenue on little mileage, would have delayed longer the improvement of other sections. It was expected that an initial limited improvement of each section would be followed in due course by a secondary stage when the progress of improvement of the system as a whole should permit the further expenditure. This was the policy of stage construction. It was a wise and useful policy as applied in the design of road surfaces. Its mistakes were its acceptance and fixation of obsolescent road alinement and its failure to anticipate the need of rights-of-way of greater width than those that in all previous time had been considered ample.
These are pardonable mistakes. When they were made, the high speeds at which motor vehicles can now travel were generally unforeseen and probably unforeseeable. The standards of alinement required by modern speed would then have been considered fantastic. The great increase of vehicle registration and traffic volume was anticipated too late, but even if it had been foreseen earlier, lack of necessary legal and popular sanctions would have prevented a forehanded acquisition of the wider rights-of-way that widened and divided roadways require.
First reasons for immediate designation of interregional system.—Past mistakes of main road location and rights-of-way neglect are understandable, but their consequences today emphasize the need for designating and preferentially improving an interregional system. For, paradoxically, the country’s most important highways which will constitute the large part of such an interregional system are the ones that have suffered most in their improvement because of these mistakes.
The explanation of the paradox is that these roads, in recognition of their prime importance, were among the earliest of our highways to be durably improved. Structurally, many of these improvements are still embarrassingly sound; but in location, in traffic capacity, and in their lack of most of the features of modern highway design that make possible the safe operation of vehicles at high speeds, they are badly obsolescent.
Most of them have long since repaid their cost in the benefits they have yielded to the heavy traffic that has moved over them. As they are rebuilt, as soon they must be, they should be built to the highest modern standards, on locations and within rights-of-way where they will have the prospect of long and beneficial service. That such an improvement of these main arterial roads of the Nation may proceed consistently in all parts of the country, that all may agree upon the particular roads comprising the national routes in all regions and in all States, and that preparations may now be made for beginning the systematic improvement of these roads in the first post-war years—these are the first reasons indicating the necessity for immediate designation of an interregional system.
