by hints that Congress would act if the States and industry did not. He thought the Federal-aid apportionment formula should be changed to give greater weight to the population factor.[1]
The Drive for More Federal Aid
The Korean emergency coupled with the continuing steady increase in vehicle registrations imposed new strains on the highways. Freight carried by highways increased by one-third in a single year, from 107 billion ton-miles in 1949 to 142 billion ton-miles in 1950.[2] The traffic increases affected all classes of highways but were felt most acutely on the Interstate System, a number of sections of which were carrying over 50,000 vehicles per day.
Contractors were plentiful, and construction prices reasonably stable; still, the States were barely able to keep up with traffic, especially in the cities. Some States, with BPR approval, adopted a stage construction policy for urban expressways, building them in little pieces to “provide immediate relief at the most seriously congested points, with a view to subsequent construction of an entire facility.[3]
The real problem with all the States was a shortage of funds. Nearly all of them had increased their gasoline taxes and registration fees, but these increases barely offset the inflation in maintenance and construction costs. In their straitened circumstances, State resentment focused on the Federal gasoline tax which had originally been imposed by Congress as an emergency revenue measure but had been continued after the war and which was yielding about $1 billion annually. Some State governors also pointed to the Federal excise taxes on automobiles, trucks, tires, oils and greases which yielded another billion dollars to the Government. Since Federal aid to the States was currently only half a billion dollars, this in the eyes of the governors was diversion of road-user funds on a massive scale—the very practice penalized by the 1934 Hayden-Cartwright Act when indulged in by the States.
The congressional road committees held exhaustive hearings in 1953 in preparation for the 83d Congress biennial highway bill.
The legislation that emerged in 1954, without acknowledging any tie between Federal-aid appropriations and the Federal gasoline tax, boosted the appropriations 50 percent above any previous level, to $875 million for fiscal years 1956 and 1957, including $175 million specifically earmarked for the Interstate System and increased the Federal share on Interstate projects to 60 percent. Congress also requested a comprehensive study of the costs of completing the several systems of highways in the States—to be completed along with a new toll road study.
The House Subcommittee on Roads had argued the merits of toll financing, but in the end, Congress avoided the toll road problem in drafting the final version of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1954 except to ask for a study and to allow Connecticut the right to charge tolls on its proposed expressway from Greenwich to Killingly after repayment of the Federal funds previously expended on the road.
In the 1954 Act, Congress, for the first time, relaxed some of the Government’s tight control over the spending of Federal-aid funds. For secondary road projects under the Secondary Road Plan, as it came to be known, the BPR was required to approve only system changes and programing of funds and to inspect and accept completed projects. By agreement between the State and the BPR, all other details of planning, contracting and building secondary roads could be handled by the State without detailed Federal supervision. This relieved the BPR of much tedious detail and enabled it to concentrate available personnel on primary and Interstate projects.
Inflation and shortage of funds during the Korean emergency made even simple maintenance difficult for the States.
The Grand Plan
Before the Secretary could prepare either the toll road study or the highway cost study requested by Congress, President Eisenhower announced his own plan for bridging the gap between highway construction and highway needs. Choosing the annual confer-
