In the same sense, the recommended interregional routes may be termed the more significant of the designated principal routes.
Location in relation to military and naval establishments and war industry.—The most urgent highway improvements during the war have been needed on roads and streets providing local access to military and naval establishments and important war industry sites. As accurately forecast by the report of the Public Roads Administration in 1941,[1] these improvements have been necessary because so many of the war establishments and industries have been located not on the principal arteries of peacetime travel but on roads or streets which have previously carried only light traffic.
The fact that these relatively short and local improvements have constituted so large a part of wartime highway construction does not indicate, however, that only these roads are of importance to the war effort. Rather, it means that except for these local approaches, the highway system of the Nation has proved to be reasonably fit to discharge its war duties, without special readying improvement.
That the routes of the recommended interregional system must bear a very large share of the longer highway movement to and from the military and naval establishments is indicated by the close proximity of the great majority of these establishments to the recommended routes. (See fig. 17.)
A similar conclusion with reference to service to war industries is justified by the comparative locations of the recommended routes and the points of early concentration of primary war industry and of industries served by roads improved during the war as access road projects. (See figs. 18 and 19.) It must be borne in mind that the industrial locations particularly referred to are only a few of the many now involved in direct production for the war and of the even larger number concerned in the many and varied industrial contributions to the total essential war economy. To represent the location of the recommended system in relation to the distribution of total-war industry would doubtless give a result little different from the indications of figure 7, which mirrors the distribution of normal peacetime industrial activity.
Location of the interregional system in relation to routes of heaviest traffic.—Connecting the largest cities of the country and the larger cities of each geographic region, passing enroute through the most populous belts of rural and small-town population, joining centers in which a high percentage of the Nation’s manufacturing activity is concentrated, traversing generally the most productive agricultural lands, and tapping the centers and areas of densest motor-vehicle ownership, it 1s naturally to be expected that the recommended system will accord well with the heaviest lines of highway traffic flow and serve in the aggregate a share of the total highway movement far in excess of its proportion of the total highway mileage.
- ↑ Highways for the National Defense, Report to the Administrator, Federal Works Agency, John M. Carmody, by the Public Roads Administration, February 1, 1941.
