should be made for a post-war highway expenditure at that rate. The extraordinary improvement of the interregional highway system proposed in this report can be counted upon to absorb any excess that may exist above the normal requirements of highway renewal and maintenance.
Should private construction or the requirements of other classes of public construction exceed the estimates herein made, the expenditure for highways may be reduced. In any case, however, it is believed that the total highway and street expenditures in each of the years immediately following the war should not be less than $3,000,000,000.
Proposed expenditure on the interregional system.—Deducting $750,000,000 for maintenance from an assumed minimum highway and street expenditure of.$3,000,000,000, leaves 2.25 billion dollars for construction. The Committee’s traffic estimates indicate that the interregional highway system, improved as recommended in this report, will serve approximately 20 percent of the total of street and highway traffic of the country. If, therefore, apportionment of the total construction expenditure were to be made strictly in the proportion of traffic served, the interregional system’s share of a total annual construction expenditure of 2.25 billion dollars for all roads and streets would be $450,000,000.
But such an apportionment would ignore important reasons warranting construction expenditure on the system in a ratio to total expenditure higher than the ratio of traffic served. First of these is the greater and more urgent needs of improvement existing on the important routes constituting the system. The nature and urgency of these needs have already been described in detail. A second and equally cogent reason is the far greater return of benefits and road-user-tax earnings to be expected from expenditure on the system.
On the basis of anticipated costs and traffic service, the Committee estimates that urban sections of the system, improved as recommended, will generate during the life of the improvements road-use-tax revenues approximately three times as great as the cost of creating and maintaining the improvements. The improved rural sections will earn, on the average, practically double their cost.
These considerations, together with the high priority of needs existing on the system, bespeak the importance of its rapid improvement, and justify, in the opinion of the Committee, the expenditure of at least 30 percent and preferably a third of all available construction funds on the system. With total construction expenditure at the rate of 2.25 billion dollars annually, this would mean an annual expenditure for improvement of the system in the amount of at least $675,000,000 and preferably $750,000,000.
With due regard for the relative needs of improvement within and without the system, it is the Committee’s opinion that expenditures in the immediate post-war years at the rate of $500,000,000 per year on urban sections of the interregional system and $250,000,000 per year on rural sections are necessary, and that such expenditures would constitute a practicable objective that could be achieved, within a total construction expenditure of 2.25 billion dollars annually, without jeopardy to the essential improvement of other parts of the entire road and street system.
