Other reasons for immediate designation.—Another consequence of past policies is the widely recognized gross inadequacy of the accommodation afforded by city streets for the heavier streams of arterial travel. Two decades ago the most obstructive deficiencies existed on the rural roads. City streets were relatively ample in their traffic capacity. Today these conditions are reversed. It is within and in the vicinity of the cities and metropolitan areas that through travel now experiences its most serious resistance and delays, resistance and delays that are abundantly shared by the heavy intraurban local traffic that tends to congregate on the same arterial routes.
Twenty years ago when the Federal Highway Act and many of the State highway enactments prohibited the expenditure of limited Federal and State funds for improvement of the transcity connections of the Federal-aid and State highway systems, the prohibition was not unreasonable. It was instead a necessary and logical recognition of the superior need of rural highway improvement. Now, with congestion of the transcity routes replacing rural highway mud as the greatest of traffic barriers, emphasis needs to be reversed and the larger expenditure devoted to improvement of the city and metropolitan sections of arterial routes. That the particular locations of these routes may be agreed upon in common by Federal, State, and municipal authorities who will share the responsibility for arterial highway improvement, that the desirable standards of that improvement may be established and commonly accepted, and that plans may at once be laid for a prompt post-war beginning of the highly essential construction work-these are other compelling reasons for the designation of an interregional system.
Optimum system proposed.—Clearly recognizing the present need, the President in his letter of April 14, 1941, to the Administrator, Federal Works Agency, appointed the National Interregional Highway Committee and directed it to review existing data and surveys and to outline and recommend a limited system of national highways designed to provide a basis for improved interregional transportation.
In all its deliberations and in the recommendations which follow, the Committee has been guided by the President’s expressed hope that it would hold national needs paramount over the needs of sections and localities. Consistent with the purpose of interregional connection and the limitation of total mileage, it is believed that the system recommended will serve as large a proportion of the total highway traffic of the Nation as it is possible to attract to any system of the same extent.
The cities and metropolitan areas of the country are known to include the sources and destinations of much the greater part of the heavy flow of traffic that moves over the Nation’s highways. The system of interregional highways proposed, within the limit of the mileage adopted, connects as many as possible of the larger cities and metropolitan areas regionally and interregionally. For this reason, although in miles it represents scarcely over 1 percent of the entire highway and street system, it will probably serve not less than 20 percent of the total street and highway traffic.
The wealth of factual information available to the Committee indicates clearly that any other system, either materially larger or smaller than that proposed, would have a lesser average utilization. The
