A New Charter For Federal Aid
Although the appropriation for 1922 was lost, the supporters of the Sells bill interpreted the lopsided vote in the House as a substantial endorsement for Federal aid. The Engineering News-Record, recognizing the “overwhelming sentiment” in favor of Federal aid, withdrew its support of the Townsend bill and urged all the highway factions to get together on a compromise measure.[1]
The Federal-aid people, under MacDonald’s leadership, were eager to compromise, and in April 1921, the Executive Committee of AASHO met in Washington to draft a bill that would retain the essential principles of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act and correct its weaknesses. To win the support of the national highway system advocates, this bill provided that each State must designate a State highway system, including not more than 7 percent of all roads in the State on which all the Federal funds must be spent. Three-sevenths of this system must be roads “interstate in character” and up to 60 percent of the Federal funds could be spent on this fraction. The bill also provided that State funds must be used to match the Federal money and that all construction and maintenance must be performed under the direct supervision of the State highway department. The State must agree to properly maintain all federally aided roads, and where the Secretary of Agriculture has found the maintenance to be inadequate, he may, after 60 days’ notice, restore the road to a proper condition of maintenance and charge the cost to the State’s apportionment of Federal funds and also withhold further Federal aid until the State refunds the money so spent. The authors got Representative Cassius Dowell of Iowa to introduce this bill when the 67th Congress convened in April 1921.[2]
Senator Townsend was also inclined to compromise, and he rewrote his bill to provide that a “post roads and federal highway commission” should select an “interstate highway system,” and set standards but that the system be built, maintained, and operated by the States with Federal aid. His bill proposed an appropriation of $200 million for a 2-year program.[3]
A few States, for one reason or another, were unable to spend all the Federal aid previously apportioned to them by the 1916 Act, and to keep them from losing the money, Senator Lawrence C. Phipps of Colorado introduced a bill extending the time limit for States to use these funds by 1 additional year for a total of 2 fiscal years beyond the fiscal year the funds were made available. This bill passed the Senate unanimously; but when it reached the House, the Committee on Roads added the Dowell bill with its limiting 7 percent system and 60 percent fund expenditure as an amendment, and in this form it was passed by the House with a thumping majority.
Eventually, after a long, hot summer of hearings and conferences, the Phipps-Dowell and Townsend bills were merged and passed with an appropriation of $75 million as the Federal Highway Act of November 9, 1921.
This Act ended, or at least submerged, the feud between the local and long-distance road advocates by concentrating the Federal-aid funds on limited interconnected systems and by requiring that the paved surface of the interstate roads should be not less than 18 feet wide. It greatly strengthened the State highway departments, especially in their maintenance function, and it permanently laid to rest the idea of a national highway system under Federal control. However, much to the disappointment of the States, the appropriation was for only 1 year (fiscal year 1922), and, thus, it failed to provide the continuity so urgently needed for program planning.[N 1]
The Federal-Aid Highway System
The selection and approval of the “7-percent system” of roads mandated by the Federal Highway Act was the largest and most important task ever assigned to the Bureau of Public Roads. In anticipation of the passage of the Act, Chief MacDonald asked each highway department to certify the total mileage of public roads in its State. These mileages totaled 2,859,575 miles, which fixed the maximum extent of the Federal-aid system at 200,170 miles.
Immediately upon passage of the Act, MacDonald requested the States to submit tentative system recommendations. At the same time, he assigned a BPR task force, under Edwin W. James, the job of devising an equitable method for testing the systems submitted by the States.
This group obtained from the Bureau of the Census its latest figures, by counties, for population, value of agricultural products, value of mineral products, value of forest products, and value of manufactured products. Calling the State population 100, they calculated a population index for each county. In the same manner they calculated county indices for the four significant production factors. Finally, by adding all these together and dividing by five they obtained a composite index for each county.
Then, according to James:
We adopted squares as emblems of the indices. When these squares, blackened in, were put into their appropriate counties on a clean map, we had a series of emblems through which diagrammetric routes could be laid out. Routes through the heaviest emblems were routes through the generally wealthiest and all around most important county areas. Road locations could be made catching obvious local control points along these diagrammatic lines, and you had a selection from best to poorest almost staring you in the face.[4]
By October 1922, tentative system maps had been received from all but nine States. Most of the routes in these systems followed existing roads, and they agreed remarkably well with the BPR task force’s studies. Surprisingly, the largest deviations from what appeared to be the best interstate routes occurred in States such as New York and Massachusetts where a large percentage of the principal roads was already improved. In these States there was “a natural disposition to designate other roads of less importance as the Federal-aid highway system for the State.”[5] These and other differences were smoothed
- ↑ Congress remedied this by appropriating a total of $190 million in Federal aid for fiscal years 1923, 1924, and 1925 in the Post Office Appropriation Act of June 19, 1922 (42 Stat 660).
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- ↑ Getting Together On Highway Policy, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 86, No. 13, Mar. 31, 1921, p. 534.
- ↑ State Officials Confer On Highway Policies, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 86, No. 16, Apr. 21, 1921, p. 696.
- ↑ Revised Townsend Road Bill Introduced, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 86, No. 18, May 5, 1921, p. 783.
- ↑ Letter from E. W. James to F. W. Cron, Feb. 21, 1967, (Original in the Department of Transportation Library, Washington, D.C.)
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1922, p. 3.
