Of the 19 toll road authorities, 17 sold bonds amounting to $4 billion during the 1950’s. This amount was two-thirds of all debt incurred by authorities. One of the two not included among these debt issues in the 1950’s—the Turnpike Authority of Kentucky—entered the bond market in 1961 and by early 1962 had sold $186 million of Turnpike revenue bonds.
The authority concept flourished because in most instances it proved successful as (1) a means of financing capital projects so as not to conflict with constitutional limitations upon the creation of debt; (2) a flexible instrument to manage “commercial” or self-supporting enterprises; and (3) an effective agency for administering joint governmental projects—international, interstate, or intercommunity.
Economic Effects
Thomas H. MacDonald commented on the relationship between advances in highway transportation, on the one hand, and economic growth and raised standards of living, on the other, in these words:
We were not a wealthy Nation when we began improving our highways . . . but the roads themselves helped us create a new wealth, in business and industry and land values. . . . So it was not our wealth that made our highways possible. Rather, it was our highways that made our wealth possible.[1]
The nature, size, and composition of the Nation’s output, the industrial structure within which it is produced, and the distribution of the corresponding income flows, both geographically and among the Nation’s families, are all dependent in some degree upon transportation facilities: their availability, location, and adequacy. Population mobility could not have been achieved without them.
The movement of goods and people is reflected in different ways: the movement of goods by truck and trailer, the movement of people by bus transit and private automobile, or the movement and expansion of physical facilities and factories across the land. To the extent that highways have aided in the more efficient allocation of resources through their influence on this mobility, they have changed the pattern of land use and development in the United States.
In the early 1960’s, it was estimated that approximately one out of every five individuals moved to another home in any single year, and one-third of these individuals moved to a different county in response to economic and social opportunities. Almost 34 million persons moved in 1960.
The travel propensities of Americans were, and are, reflected in the number of mobile homes in the United States. The Mobile Home Manufacturer’s Association estimated that in 1958 almost 98,000 mobile homes and nearly 31,000 trailers were produced, and that 1.2 million mobile homes in the United States housed some 3.5 million persons.
The emphasis on mobility is also illustrated by the investment of Americans in motor vehicles. In 1961, motor vehicles numbered more than 76 million, an increase of about 190 percent over a 30-year period, during which population increased by about 45 percent. Thus, motor-vehicle ownership had increased at a rate more than four times that of population growth.
Goods Movement by Highway
Truck use of highways aids productivity in at least two ways: by expanding market areas and by lower- ing distribution costs. In goods movement, the reduction of unit transport costs is a direct benefit to shippers. Whether these savings are passed on to the consumer or are partially absorbed by shippers or their employees, significant savings are realized by the national economy. Between 1958 and 1968, the ton-miles moved by highway increased by 60 percent, nearly twice the 36 percent increase for rail.
In 1963, panel trucks, station wagons, and pickup trucks constituted nearly 60 percent of the total number of trucks in the United States but carried less than 10 percent of the tonnage. Tractor-semitrailers, on the other hand, represented only 5 percent of the number of trucks but handled 32 percent of the tonnage.
Piggyback Revived
The fact that no single mode of transportation is capable of moving all kinds of freight with equal efficiency suggests that the roles of the various modes should be more complementary than competitive in many areas. A system enabling each mode of transportation to perform the service for which it has the greatest inherent advantage would contribute to more efficient use of resources, the greatest need of today. The development is as yet in an early stage, since the setting is highly institutionalized and the American transportation industry has always been aggressively competitive.
The highway-rail piggyback service that had been the subject of experimentation in the previous two decades had all but disappeared by the late 1940’s. A revival of efforts to inaugurate piggyback service followed an Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) ruling in the New Haven case in 1954 that railroads could haul trailers on flat cars (TOFC) under the provisions of rail tariffs without having a motor carrier certificate. As a result, 32 railroads offered TOFC service by January 1, 1955. The number of TOFC/COFC (container-on-flatcar) rail cars loaded in that year was 168,000. This was the first significant break through the wall of aggressive intermodal competitiveness that has characterized the American transportation industry.
Piggyback combines the flexibility and low cost of truck pickup and delivery and terminal service with the low cost of rail line-haul operations. Because of its significantly lower costs, it has grown most rapidly in the transport of goods having a high value over medium and long distances.
Diversion to rail from highway freight transportation is most likely to occur along high-traffic corridors between major metropolitan centers, and its magnitude was not sufficient to have much dampening effect on the total volume and growth of truck traffic.
Through the 1950’s the frequency of heavy gross vehicle loads, especially for vehicles of 50,000 pounds or more, showed a steady, strong upward trend. From 1950 to 1959, the frequency of trucks in this weight class increased from 58 to 227 per 1,000 trucks and combinations, loaded and empty, a nearly fourfold gain. New truck registrations by weight class showed
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads, Highway and Economic and Social Change (U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Washington, D.C, 1964), p. 1.
