OUR HIGHWAYS DETERIORATE
Vehicle registrations and travel mileages, enormous though they have been, do not fully disclose the constantly increasing demands on our highways. Increased weight of vehicles, higher average speeds, heavier axle loads have caused a serious deterioration of inadequately designed highways.
The 4-year moratorium on construction imposed during World War II prevented both adequate maintenance and replacement, thus causing further deterioration.
The shrinkage in the purchasing power of the road dollar has also contributed to our present situation. While dollar expenditures for road construction have increased in approximately the same ratio that their purchasing power has declined, the actual level of construction is not much higher than it was in 1940.
Thus, our road improvement programs have failed to keep pace with a growth in traffic which requires far more capacity of our road plant.
SAFETY
In any consideration of road deficiencies, the safety factor must assume large importance. As President Eisenhower has said, we have an “annual death toll comparable to the casualties of a bloody war, beyond calculation in dollar terms,” and as stated by the governors’ report:
A simple dollar standard will not measure the “savings” that might be secured if our highways were designed to promote maximum safety, so that lives were not lost and injuries sustained in accidents caused by unsafe highways. Various estimates have been made of the number or proportion of traffic deaths due to inadequate, unsafe highways; data do not exist to permit accurate evaluation of these estimates. But whatever the potential saving in life and limb may be, it lends special urgency to the designing and construction of an improved highway network.
Replacement of the obsolete and dangerous highway facilities which contribute to this tragic condition with roads of modern design will substantially reduce this toll. The death rate on high-type, heavily traveled arteries with modern design, including control of access, is only a fourth to a half as high as it is on less adequate highways. The average motorist today will undoubtedly be surprised to learn that he pays considerably more for insurance to protect himself against accident costs than he pays in State fuel tax and license fees which supply almost the entire financial support for the streets and highways over which he operates.
