America's Highways 1776–1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program/Part 1/Chapter 9

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America's Highways 1776–1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program
Federal Highway Administration

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Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, pages 90–111

3961600America's Highways 1776–1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program — Planning a Highway SystemFederal Highway Administration

Planning
A Highway
System

The Clouds of War
The United States was only slightly prepared for hostilities when war was declared against Germany April 6, 1917. The total strength of the Army was less than 200,000 men, and most of these were recent enlistments in the early stages of training. Perhaps half a dozen regiments stationed in the Canal Zone and on the Mexican border were at war strength; the rest of the Regular Army was scattered all over the country in battalion-sized garrisons. Some industries had tooled up to produce munitions for the Allies, and America was making large shipments of food to Europe; but these were only token efforts compared to those that would be required to fight a full-scale war.

Within a week of the Declaration of War, President Wilson created the Council of National Defense, consisting of the Secretaries of War, the Navy, Agriculture, the Interior, Commerce, and Labor, along with an unpaid Advisory Council of industrialists, labor leaders, financiers, and prominent citizens from all walks of life. Boards and committees functioning under the authority of the National Council eventually supervised every aspect of the war effort, including regulation of the national economy.

On May 17, 1917, Congress imposed Selective Service, and the United States set out to build an army of a million men. This national Army was to be trained in 16 huge cantonments, each as large as a good-sized city, complete with railroad tracks and terminals, sewers, waterworks, streets, roads, and housing for 22,000 men. First, however, it was necessary to train the officers who would train the men; and for this job the Army built 12 officer training camps at existing military posts. All of this construction went on at such a pace that the 12 officer training camps and 9 of the 16 cantonments were completed by June 14, 1917 — just 30 days after the program was started.^[1]

A drastic industrial expansion paralleled the military mobilization. Steel mills were expanded. The capacity of portland cement mills was increased to meet the spiraling demand triggered by an immense construction program. Brand new shipyards were built in eastern ports to build steel and concrete ships to replace the dozens sunk each month by German U-boats; and at Sparrows Point, Maryland, Bethlehem Steel built a city to house its shipyard workers, complete with sewerage, water, and streets.

Breakdown of a Lopsided Transportation System
The railroads were as unprepared for war as the rest of the country—perhaps more so. For a decade they had been under effective Government regulation, and to preserve competition they had been prohibited from pooling freight or from merging parallel competing lines, even where such mergers would have resulted in more efficient systems. The years 1913 and 1914 were a period of sluggish business activity during which the earnings of the railroads had been low and their dividends small. They had had difficulty borrowing money for equipment and improvement of terminals, and some authorities estimated that the American railroads as a whole were 5,000 locomotives short of the number needed to handle traffic in normal times, especially during the fall harvest.

At the low point of the 1914 recession, the railroads had about 400,000 idle cars. In 1915 traffic began to pick up under the stimulation of war orders from the Allies, and by September 1916, cars were beginning to be scarce. When the United States entered the war, there was a nationwide shortage of about 148,000 cars.^[2]

Foreseeing trouble ahead, the railway executives met in Washington on April 11, 1917, and “voluntarily agreed to merge their ‘individual and competitive activities to produce a maximum of national transportation efficiency.’ ”^[3] They created the Railroads’ War Board, a committee of five top executives, to coordinate the operations of the mainline railroads and draw up rules for conservation of motive power, joint use of terminals, and the use of embargoes against shipments to areas already choked with loaded cars. The board eliminated unnecessary or competing passenger trains and luxury services. They organized an educational campaign among shippers to promote better utilization of cars^{[N 1]} and quicker loading and unloading. By September 1917, these efforts had reduced the car shortage to about 34,000 cars, and the railroads had moved 16 percent more freight than in the corresponding period of 1916, which itself had been a record year.

The importance of streets and highways in shipping goods was demonstrated during the war as increasing numbers of trucks carried commercial or military supplies. Below, army trucks wait for a load of tires.

Despite the efforts of the Railroads’ War Board, the transportation picture became darker as the fall harvest of 1917 approached, and creeping paralysis began to spread over the railroad system. Coastal ships that normally carried coal from Chesapeake Bay ports to New England were diverted to trans-Atlantic service, throwing an extra load on the rails. Ancient locomotives that had been continued in service far beyond their normal lifespan began to break down. Traditionally underpaid track labor left the railroads for the warplants, and track maintenance declined to a dangerous level. However, the major bottlenecks appeared at the terminals, which for dense traffic lines, fixed the ultimate limit of the traffic that could be handled. In the words of one executive, “Its terminals are the heart of a transportation system. If the terminals are inadequate to handle the traffic currently, then congestion follows, traffic is set off between terminals, the arteries become clogged, and the system fails to perform its functions properly.”^[5]

↑ It was estimated that in 1916 an average carload of less-than-carload package freight was only 7 tons, whereas the capacity of a properly loaded car was several times that amount.^[4]

The poor loading of railroad cars added to the general inability of the railroad system to handle all the transportation needs of the war years.

The terminal tieups came about from a variety of causes. Due to shortage of ships, export freight accumulated in the North Atlantic terminals. Contractors for cantonments and shipyards ordered materials forwarded far in advance of their ability to receive and unload them. (At one time over 5,000 carloads of wooden piling were tied up in the Hog Island shipyard waiting to be unloaded.) Feverish demand for materials to keep industry going led manufacturers to purchase raw materials from unusual markets in excessive quantities, with the result that arrivals were badly bunched and unloading was slow and difficult.

In many terminals antiquated business procedures were a principal cause of congestion. Older cities such as New York had an inadequate number of team tracks where freight could be unloaded directly from the cars into drays and trucks. Most freight consigned to lower Manhattan, even in carload lots, was unloaded at freight depots and stored there until picked up by the consignee, who was notified by mail of the shipment’s arrival. Due to congestion in the mails, the notice might take 3 days to reach the consignee who then had 48 hours in which to pick up the goods.

Indescribable traffic congestion prevailed around the freight houses. Some trucks stood in line for hours or even days to pick up a few boxes of freight. One count at a Manhattan depot showed 100 drays standing in line at 7 a.m. waiting for loads. Unloading from the freight cars was often haphazard, so that a truck driver might have difficulty finding his consignment and then even more trouble getting it to the loading dock.

With freight piling up in the stations, the railroads set off incoming cars in the freight yards, and when these also filled up, on any available empty siding at small towns approaching the city. As these, too, became filled, the congestion spread outward as much as 30 or, in extreme cases, 50 miles from the city. Eventually, the railroads were forced to embargo further shipments to that city until some of the congestion cleared up.

Toward the end of the war the railroads, then under Government operation, cleared up much of the terminal congestion by instituting “store–door delivery.” Under this system, cities were divided into zones. Freight consigned to addresses in these zones was unloaded from the cars into specified areas on the loading docks, where it was picked up by registered trucks and delivered direct to the consignee without prior notice. If the consignee was not ready to accept the shipment, it was taken immediately to a public warehouse and stored at the consignee’s expense. By eliminating the free storage at the depot, this system broke the bottleneck in a few weeks. Store–door delivery also reduced the enormously inefficient waste of tracks and labor waiting for loads at the freight stations.

Unable to get long-haul freight into the cities, the railroads refused to accept short-haul shipments such as milk and produce from the surrounding country, and the food distribution system began to suffer. A few farmers who owned trucks began to drive them into the city with loads of vegetables instead of to the nearest railroad station. At the other end, wholesalers and even retailers began to send their own trucks out into the country for loads of produce. The cost per mile was more than for rail shipment, but the delay was less and terminal costs were eliminated at both ends, so they at least broke even on the business.

Birth of the Trucking Industry
Practically every large business in the cities had a few trucks for drayage and deliveries, and by 1917 most of these were power driven.^{[N 1]} When the city terminals began to choke up, some consignees had their shipments sent to outlying towns and sent their trucks there to receive them, at the same time carrying outgoing shipments. Soon, hundreds of trucks were being used in this way, and the radius of operation was constantly increasing.

Akron, Ohio, tied up with a package freight embargo, broke the embargo by truck hauls to 14 outlying shipping points within a radius of 20 miles. A New York drug firm started making weekly deliveries to Boston in its own trucks. Cleveland manufacturers bought motor trucks and started a motor freight service to bring castings from foundries 20 to 30 miles away. An Akron tire manufacturer found it feasible to deliver to Detroit and Boston by truck, and a new household moving business began operating between Chicago and Milwaukee. Some shippers used trucks for the first part of a haul that would have required two rail carriers, avoiding the transfer between railroads. In June 1917, nine new trucks were driven from Hartford, Wisconsin, to Baltimore—1,200 miles—under their own power because the manufacturer couldn’t get railroad cars; and in Connecticut, when the railroads embargoed certain classes of freight, truck transport made it possible to keep factories open.^[6]

↑ In 1917 there were 391,000 motor trucks registered in the United States, most of them used in the cities.

By August 1917, car shortages and embargoes had diverted so much traffic to trucks that the highways began to show signs of distress. Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and New England had fairly good networks of bituminous macadam roads; but these were of light construction, seldom more than 7 or 8 inches thick, and also were in many places only 14 to 16 feet wide. At this time all trucks ran on solid rubber tires, and since there were no laws against overloading, many were loaded to the full capacity of their engines. Within a few months maintenance costs began to soar, as the thin road crusts wore out and broke through. The States and counties were unable to get railroad cars to haul stone and bituminous material, and they increased over-the-road hauling with their own trucks, throwing a further load on the highways. The Connecticut Legislature made an emergency appropriation of $6.5 million just to keep the main highways passable for traffic. Massachusetts spent $2 million on maintenance of State highways alone and $1.25 million for resurfacing and strengthening trunk routes. Other States were faced with similar huge expenditures at a time of rapidly escalating costs and labor shortage.

The Plight of the Highway Contractors
The large highway bond issues of 1915 and 1916, plus the prospect of sizable road expenditures under the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act, led many experienced and inexperienced contractors into the road business. With the outbreak of war, they immediately began to encounter difficulties in getting materials, especially steel, and in retaining labor on the job. Within a few months material costs advanced 20 to 30 percent and wages of common labor went up to $2.50 and even $3.00 per day. Railroad car shortages made deliveries of stone and asphalt uncertain. Large numbers of contractors were forced out of business, and others, having completed their contracts, refused to bid for new work.

The virtual collapse of the highway construction industry created a desperate situation for States and counties struggling to keep the roads open in the face of ever-increasing numbers of heavy trucks and devastating losses of personnel to war industry and the Army. What made the job particularly heartbreaking was the sentiment openly expressed in some segments of the war effort hierarchy that roadbuilding was nonessential work that should be discontinued for the duration of the emergency.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Hicks Company in Rockville, Md., was making local deliveries of dry goods. This was a forerunner of the scene on a much larger scale during World War I when local deliveries for all kinds of goods became a demand with the advent of motorized delivery trucks.

As the summer of 1917 advanced, a coal famine began to develop in the industrial eastern States because of the shortage of railway cars. Production of munitions was beginning to be affected when the Priority Board of the Council of National Defense issued Priority Order No. 2, to be effective November 1, 1917, prohibiting the use of open top cars other than flat cars for shipping supplies, other than coal, for construction, maintenance and repair of public and private highways, streets, and sidewalks or for theaters and other places of amusement.^[7] This peremptory order, issued without public hearings or other advance warning, struck the States “like a bolt from the blue,” at a particularly bad time. It caught them with many miles of new road graded but not surfaced with winter approaching. Despite the fact that trucking had already released thousands of cars for war purposes and the roads in the vicinity of cantonments and ports of embarkation were being pounded to pieces by truck traffic, the Priority Board refused to recede from its position, and road work and road materials production that was dependent on rail transportation ground to a stop.

State highway officials on inspection tour of 1917 construction project in Michigan. Such projects were soon forced to stop when involvement in the war caused shortage of materials and manpower.

Truck assembly increased to meet the war needs.

As a direct result of the widespread protests over Priority Order No. 2, the National Council set up a Highway Transport Committee in Washington to represent the highway and highway transport interests, and appointed Roy D. Chapin, President of the Hudson Motor Company, as chairman. This Committee began its work November 29, 1917.

The National Military Truck Routes
The experience of the Allies had shown that enormous numbers of trucks would be needed in France to support military operations. The War Production Board decided to standardize truck designs to simplify parts supply and increase production, and they induced the motor industry to design two vehicles on which to concentrate production for the duration of the war. Class A trucks were to have a capacity of 3 tons and a speed of 14 miles per hour, while Class B trucks would carry 5 tons at 12 miles per hour. The Army placed an order for 30,000 of these trucks in September 1917.

Several months before the Highway Transport Committee was organized, Chapin advanced the idea that trucks destined for France could be driven from the factories to the ports of embarkation, and he obtained the Army’s approval for an experimental convoy. On November 22, 1917, a trail-blazing party consisting of representatives of the Ohio Highway Department, the Army, the Lincoln Highway Association, and the OPRRE left Toledo enroute to the East Coast. The route they selected crossed Ohio via Toledo and Akron to East Palestine, where the Pennsylvania Highway Department picked it up, continuing on to Pittsburgh and across the Allegheny Mountains to Harrisburg, Lancaster, and Philadelphia. This became the main military truck route. Later, other truck routes were designated by Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland over the Old National Road, and by Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York via Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, and Albany to New York City.

A caravan of trucks from Detroit headed for eastern seaports and the war.

In December the Quartermaster General announced that, in order to relieve the squeeze on railroad cars, the trucks would be driven overland to the Atlantic Coast under their own power.^[8] The first Army truck convoy left Toledo early in December 1917, at the beginning of one of the most severe winters in recent U.S. history. Three weeks later, on January 3, 1918, 29 of the 30 vehicles that began the trip rolled into Baltimore.^[9] This grueling trip was testimony to the durability of the war-model trucks and the endurance of the drivers, but most of all, to the superb maintenance efforts of the Pennsylvania Highway Department, which, as a result of careful preplanning, had kept the road open over the Alleghenies in the face of blizzards that left drifts 3 to 6 feet deep. In some places the crews worked around the clock to keep the road open. Teams and drags broke a track through the drifts, followed by horsedrawn road machines and homemade plows mounted on trucks.^[10] Altogether, 7 trucks and plows, 22 road machines, 20 drags, 105 teams, 3 tractors, and 200 men were thrown into this massive and successful maintenance effort.^[11]

McConnellsburg, Pa., and other similar towns and villages witnessed the industrial might of the Nation as caravans of trucks rolled through on the way “over there.”

Military vehicles were not the only ones to use the truck roads. Because they were kept free of snow throughout the winter, they attracted large numbers of private trucks and automobiles. In Ohio this traffic was particularly heavy:

With the congested condition of the railroads and their inability to promptly handle supplies that were needed in almost every community, it became necessary after opening up main arteries for travel to open up the lateral roads in order to reach the possible outlet to and from markets and villages. The amount of traffic these highways must sustain is apparent. The truck traffic was practically constant with all additional vehicles conceivable using many of the roads . . . Not only did truck and automobile traffic greatly increase, but burdens were placed upon them clearly in excess of what any ordinary road would be expected to carry. This great increase in traffic was, of necessity, confined largely to such roads as had been prepared by the removal of snow drifts, etc.^[12]

In the months following the first convoy, the Army sent the remaining 30,000 trucks east via the truck routes, each loaded with 3 tons or more of spare parts and munitions. This operation released 17,250 railroad cars for other work, but the cost per ton-mile was high, even without considering the efforts of the States and counties to keep the roads open. From a historical viewpoint, the main accomplishment of the truck routes was to demonstrate that it was possible to keep long stretches of highway open to traffic through a severe winter and that dependable long-distance interstate travel on the highways was desirable and even necessary.

Snowplows played an important role in keeping the military truck routes open.

Trucks were steadily being built for war duty, but highway officials were hard pressed to get funds or materials to maintain the roads damaged by the trucks.

The Highway Departments Call for a National War Policy for Roads
When the annual meeting of the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) opened at Richmond, Virginia, December 4, 1917, the problem uppermost in the minds of the delegates was how to carry on and keep the roads open in the face of what many of them perceived to be a hostile policy by the Government toward highway transportation. Priority Order No. 2 was only the latest action hampering their efforts. The War Industries Board had assumed control over all supplies of cement, brick, steel, stone, and gravel and was giving the highest priorities for these materials to defense installations and the railroads. The Fuel Administration controlled the supply of fuel oil, and to make more fuel available, it restricted the production of asphalt. No bond issues exceeding $100,000 could be made without the assent of the Capital Issues Committee, a war organization that was particularly hostile to highways. Clearing a project through these war agencies was a matter of weeks and even months since there was very little cooperation between them.

To make things easier for the Government, AASHO called upon all the States to designate the essential war roads and estimate the amounts of materials and rail transportation that would be needed for their construction and maintenance during the coming year. These programs would then clear through the Executive Committee of AASHO and in due course be presented to the Priority Board and to the Highway Transport Committee of the National Council, of which Director Page of the OPRRE was a member.^[13]

The delegates also passed a resolution,

. . . That the American Association of State Highway Officials request the United States Government to formulate and promulgate, as soon as possible, a definite policy for road and street construction and maintenance, and that it is requested that said policy contain a statement that freight cars shall be furnished next spring for the transportation of the necessary materials for the construction and maintenance of streets and roads of economic or military value.^[14]

There was a note of urgency in this resolution, for the State officials knew that the spring breakup was only a few months away. Throughout the winter the roads, once cleared of snow, could carry heavy trucks because they were frozen solid, but every highway engineer and maintenance superintendent knew what could be expected after the spring thaw began.

The Department of Agriculture immediately endorsed the AASHO plan and asked all States to submit their priority programs as soon as possible.

Government Seizure of the Railroads
To avert complete paralysis, the Government seized all the mainline steam railroads on December 26, 1917, and set up a Federal Railroad Administration to operate them. This was not so much a reflection on the work of the Railroads’ War Board as an admission that only a Government agency could suspend the operation of the antitrust laws and the onerous regulations of the Interstate Commerce Commission, designed to foster competition, and force the various war agencies to resolve their conflicting demands for transportation. “The government can ignore the anti-trust laws, force the various war-supply departments to accept what transportation is given them, eliminate the problems of credit and capital for future construction, and settle beyond dispute the demands of labor.”^[15]

The Railroad Administration organized the seized lines into three huge systems—the Eastern Railroads, Southern Railroads, and Western Railroads, pooling equipment and terminals. Since the Government now had direct control over all railroad cars, the Priority Board suspended the operation of Priority Order No. 2, and on February 6, 1918, Director General of Railroads McAdoo assured AASHO that “The United States Railroad Administration will cooperate with the Secretary of Agriculture by transporting materials for construction of national highways designated by it as a military or economic necessity, when the equipment is available and not needed to move supplies for the army, navy, shipping board, or other governmental activities.”^[16]

The Quagmires of Spring
In 1917 very few States had load limit laws to protect their highways. Michigan had just passed a law requiring reduced loads during the spring thaw. A 1913 Pennsylvania law permitted gross vehicle loads of 24,000 pounds, not to exceed 750 pounds per inch width of tire, and a few eastern States had similar laws. But these laws were not enforced strictly and apparently not at all against military vehicles. Prophetically, the Engineering News-Record warned of the coming debacle and urged engineering societies and the press to prepare the public for it: “The universal cry for a more complete use of the roads in order to relieve the railroads of their abnormal burdens will probably be utilized as an excuse to evade or even violate intentionally not only statute law [on vehicle loading], but the law of reason.”^[17]

This Fairfax County, Va., road, macadam surfaced with bituminous materials, shows the effect of truck traffic in 1918.

With the arrival of spring, the predicted destruction occurred on an unprecedented scale. In Delaware a single truck with a gross load of 11 tons broke up a light macadam road from end to end in one trip. In New York bituminous macadam roads that had given good service for 5 to 10 years broke up and became impassable under truck traffic averaging only 30 heavy vehicles per day. Roads that cost $11,000 per mile to build in 1912 were destroyed so completely that the State estimated it would cost $32,000 per mile to repair them at inflated 1918 costs. In New Jersey the “heavy truck would break through the crust, and immediately upon being extricated would be followed by others, until there was formed a veritable quagmire.”^[18]

Supposedly higher types of pavement, such as cement concrete and brick on concrete bases, also failed, principally because the extremely thin 4-inch and 5-inch slabs failed to bridge the soft spots in the subgrade. However, in Wayne County, Michigan, which for a number of years had been using progressively thicker concrete pavements, 8- and 9-inch slabs stood up remarkably well under some of the heaviest trucking in the Nation.

In normal times the States and counties would have closed their roads to save them from destruction, but in time of war this was unthinkable. It was also impracticable to force the truckers to lighten their loads enough to provide any real relief. The highway departments handled the emergency as best they could. Those that were able to get railroad cars hauled in immense quantities of stone and gravel. Others, such as Massachusetts, used nearby supplies of poor quality gravel and soft stone rather than wait for railroad cars to haul in better materials:

While the roads would not wear as long, we felt that in these times as this work could be done without closing them so they could still be used by the traffic, and as four carloads of bitumen would be sufficient to construct a mile of road which would require 40 carloads of cement or from 70 to 80 carloads of imported stone or gravel, that this would save rail shipments and thereby help the general traffic situation.^[19]

In this emergency the States, despite the AASHO priority road program, were still having difficulties getting railroad cars, asphalt and road materials for maintenance. To get things moving faster, the Secretary of Agriculture, at Director Page’s suggestion, invited the Army, the War Production Board, the Fuel Administration, the Railroad Administration, and the Capital Issues Committee to name representatives to meet with Page in a council to coordinate the Government’s highway activities. At its first meeting June 8, 1918, this United States Highway Council elected Mr. Page as chairman, and thereafter until it dissolved on November 13, 1918, the Council passed on over 7,300 applications for highway financing, railway cars or materials. By acting as a clearinghouse for the industry, the Council drastically shortened the time required for project approvals, approving 95 percent of the asphalt applied for, 50 percent of the crushed stone, and 45 percent of the open top cars, but only 12 percent of the steel and 15 percent of the highway financing.^[20]

With so much destruction occurring in such a short time, primarily as a result of national defense needs, it was inevitable that there should be appeals to Congress to pay for the damage. Representative John G. Cooper of Ohio introduced a bill “to aid the States in the maintenance, repair, and reconstruction of roads subjected to extraordinary wear by reason of the use of such roads by the Government of the United States.” This bill never emerged from committee, probably because its essential purpose was accomplished by other legislation.

Amazing Growth of Truck Transportation
The production of trucks was not greatly restricted during the war, and in fact was encouraged. Throughout 1918 the truck factories turned out about 19,000 units per month, and at the end of 1918 there were about 525,000 nonmilitary trucks of all sizes registered in the United States. This was an increase of 199,000 over 1917.^[21]

In spite of war restrictions on fuel and the generally poor condition of the roads, for-hire trucking thrived in an atmosphere unclouded by Government regulation and surcharged by intense competition. The heavy demand for trucking was not due solely to the failure of the railroads and their embargoes on short-haul package freight. Shippers were becoming aware that for short hauls, trucks could greatly shorten delivery time. This was dramatically illustrated early in the war when a disastrous fire occurred in Salem, Massachusetts. Using trucks to bring tents to shelter the victims, the National Guard was able to complete the trip from Framingham, 42 miles away, in only 3 hours. Due mostly to terminal delays, this shipment would have taken 2 days by rail.^[22]

Trucking also saved drayage charges at both ends of the shipment, and these, even in normal times, were often more than the railroad freight charges. Also, shippers soon found that boxing and crating could often be omitted without increasing breakage. Thus, although the cost of truck hauling was 12 to 25 cents per ton-mile, this was no greater than the total door-to-door cost of rail shipment for short haul trips.^{[N 1]}

Despite the intense and unregulated competition, a number of reliable motor carriers established regular service between the principal cities. Beginning in November 1917, the Beam Fletcher Corporation operated twenty-two 5-ton White trucks between Philadelphia and New York carrying 400 tons per day.^[25] Early in 1918 the Liberty Highway Company began a motor express business between Toledo and Detroit with daily runs of a 5-ton, four-wheel-drive Walter truck pulling three 5-ton trailers. The running time was 7½ to 9 hours one way, depending on the weather and the condition of a 12-mile stretch of unsurfaced dirt road on the main route between these cities. (If the road was bad, the driver might have to pull his trailers through the 12-mile gap one at a time.)^[26]

In Maryland, the Farmers’ Cooperative Association of Harford County obtained a franchise to operate a motor express on the Baltimore-Bel Air Road to haul milk and produce to Baltimore, returning with empty milk cans and package express for the farmers.^[27] And in Alabama the Civic Association of Birmingham averted a coal famine by contracting with the Jenkins Motor Company to haul 200 tons of coal per day direct from the mines to consumers.^[28]

↑ In normal times the terminal charges for rail freight were 15 to 45 cents per ton, depending on the commodity and the terminal. Once loaded on cars, mainline railroads could haul freight for only 2% mills per ton-mile, and even low-traffic branch lines could haul for 2 or 3 cents per ton-mile. In 1916, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s average system operating cost was 4.3 mills per ton-mile, including terminal charges.^[23] Railroad men estimated that an average railroad car traveled about 25 miles per day, spending 12 hours in terminals for every hour of movement between terminals.^[24]

Trucks also played an important role in civilian life by making short haul runs faster and cheaper than could the overburdened trains.

Even greater tonnages, in the aggregate, were hauled by business and industry in company-owned vehicles. In 1917 and 1918, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company ran its trucks on schedule from Akron to Chicago and even Boston, carrying relief drivers and running day and night. By the spring of 1918, the White Motor Company of Cleveland was sending most of its new trucks to the East under their own power over the “Liberty Highway,” a route through central New York which the White Company drivers had pioneered to avoid the massive breakups on the Army truck routes. After 1 year of truck deliveries, the Otis Elevator Company found that it had saved $100,000 in the cost of boxing and crating for truck shipments as compared to rail shipment, as well as a great deal of paper work. Where 6 days to 6 weeks had been required for rail delivery, the company trucks needed only 24 hours and delivered the goods in better condition. Because of the shorter delivery time, less capital was tied up in goods in transit.^[29]

These and similar experiences by hundreds of other shippers permanently changed the shipping habits of American industry. In a matter of a few months, the railroads lost millions of tons of freight business by default—business they were destined never to recover.

Fresh Vegetables by Mail
The Post Office Department began rural mail delivery by automobile in 1915, and by 1917 a considerable number of the 43,562 rural routes were motorized, but of these, only 288 emanated from the 50 largest cities.^{[N 1]}^[32]

In July 1916, Congress authorized the Postmaster General to conduct experiments in three or more communities to determine “the most practical means of extending the operations of the parcel post in the direction of promoting the marketing of farm products and furthering direct transactions between producers and consumers.”^[33]

By the time the Government established the first experimental routes, war had been declared, and the pinch on railroad cars for short-haul shipments was already being felt. Although the service was not cheap (½ cent per pound for hauls averaging 50 miles), it was enthusiastically received by farmers along the routes and widely praised in the press. Herbert Hoover, the Federal Food Administrator, hailed the service as a means for saving food, 50 percent of which was rotting in the field for lack of transportation. Others pointed out that rural express would relieve draft animals from transportation duty, releasing land devoted to growing animal fodder for the raising of human food. Still others envisioned public food markets in the cities, supplied direct from the fields by parcel post. And, of course, the service would enable farmers to devote more time to raising food and less time to taking it to market.^[34]

↑ The dispatch of rural mail by automobile began July 1, 1915, at Quarryville, Pennsylvania. The vehicles were required to be of at least 80 cubic feet capacity and able to carry 800 pounds of mail.^[30] In 1915 carriers serving motor vehicle routes that were at least 50 miles long, 6 days per week, received $1,800 per year. Carriers serving horsedrawn vehicle routes at least 24 miles long received $1,200 per year. All carriers were required to furnish their own transportation.^[31]

The Government established eight routes, mostly in the Washington-Baltimore-Philadelphia area, and operated them with 19 Government-owned 1-ton trucks. The Department kept precise records of all direct and indirect expenses, including Department overhead and depreciation on the vehicles. For the 6 months ending May 31, 1918, the Postmaster General reported to Congress that only one route, between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, had lost money and that the operation as a whole had grossed $152,217 in 6 months against total expenses of $29,100, for net earnings of $123,118.^[35]

Projecting these enormous profits on a theoretical nationwide rural express network of 10,000 miles, the Postmaster General estimated gross revenues of $80 million per year, with a surplus of about $40 million per year above all operating and Departmental expenses. This surplus, he recommended, might well be spent to improve the roads of the network to a high standard to reduce vehicle operating costs and ensure reliable daily service. Such roads should be of concrete or brick, at least 16 feet wide and 9 inches thick, and would cost about $20,000 per mile, or $200 million for the network.^[36]

Earlier in the 2d session of the 65th Congress, Senator Claude A. Swanson of Virginia had introduced a bill that would permit the Postmaster General to establish a Federal network of motor express routes and to devote one-half of the gross revenues from these routes to improve them for motor truck operation. Despite the statistical support of the Postmaster General’s optimistic report, this bill failed in committee. Congress, instead, included an item of $300,000 in the Post Office appropriation for fiscal year 1919 to be used by the Postmaster General for experiments in motor truck delivery in the vicinity of large cities “. . . to promote the conservation of food products and to facilitate the collection and delivery thereof from producer to consumer, and the delivery of articles necessary in the production of such food products.”^[37]

This was July 1918. By the time the Postmaster General came back to Congress with his next report, the war had ended and conditions had radically changed. Private enterprises such as the Farmers’ Cooperative Association of Harford County had moved into the transportation vacuum the Government hoped to fill and were doing the job for much less than the fourth class mail rate. The motor route service did not materially increase new postal business, and the service was made to show a profit only by diverting fourth class mail to the Department’s trucks that would otherwise have gone by train.^[38]

Post Roads Versus Through Roads
The first impact of the war on the Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering was a loss of men, some in key positions, who volunteered for military service.^{[N 1]} When the Secretary of War requested engineers to plan and supervise the building of roads for the Army cantonments, Director Page assigned 18 experienced men to this work for periods of a year or more. Page also assigned engineers to map the Army truck routes and channeled most of his laboratory’s efforts into war work.

What personnel remained after these losses and assignments were concentrated on the Federal-aid program. Although severely crippled by manpower shortages, the States continued to submit Federal-aid projects for approval throughout the war. By July 1918, the OPRRE had approved 572 projects, totaling 6,249 miles in length, estimated to cost $42.28 million, of which $16.05 million was Federal aid. However, only five projects, totaling 17.6 miles, had actually been completed.

The Federal Aid Road Act provided that the Federal funds could be spent only in the construction of “rural post roads,” defined as “any public road over which the United States mails now are or may hereafter be transported, excluding every street and road in a place having a population, as shown by the latest available Federal census, of two thousand five hundred or more, except that portion of any such street or road along which the houses average more than two hundred feet apart.” The Act also provided that the Secretary of Agriculture and the State highway departments “shall agree upon the roads to be constructed and the character and method of construction.”

The Secretary, acting through the OPRRE, at the outset of the program tried to eliminate haphazard roadbuilding by asking each State to submit an overall plan or scheme showing where the State proposed to spend its share of the 5-year Federal appropriation. This wise requirement forced the States that did not already have established highway systems to begin classifying their highways and setting up systems. This kind of planning and the organization and strengthening of the several State highway departments were the principal accomplishments of the first 2 years of the Federal-aid program.^[39]

Very early in the program the States began to have difficulty scheduling improvements to their major system roads that would also follow the rural post routes. In keeping with good system planning, the State trunkline roads were laid out along comparatively direct lines between county seats and major cities. The post routes, on the other hand, meandered through the country to enable the carriers to serve the greatest number of patrons with the least travel. The Attorney General held that to prove the post road requirement would “require the submission of evidence to show that the mails are actually carried over the road proposed to be improved or that there is a reasonable prospect that this will be done.”^[40]

↑ Of 187 male employees on the rolls when war was declared, 52 or 28 percent had entered the military service by June 1918. When the war ended, 79 were in the service.

The OPRRE made as liberal an interpretation as possible and ruled that the direct route could be followed as long as it also substantially followed post routes with gaps of only a mile or two in length.

Yet even with this liberalized interpretation, some of the western States found the post road clause an impossible hurdle to clear. In most of them, the main highways most in need of improvement ran through sparsely populated prairies, deserts, and mountains where there was no prospect of rural post routes being needed or established for decades. Nevada, a State as large as all of New England, had only four rural routes.

The industrialized eastern States were also denied the full benefits of Federal aid by the provision in the Act limiting Federal participation to 50 percent of the cost up to a maximum of $10,000 per mile. Many of the eastern States were beginning to build heavier and wider pavements and these, with wartime inflation, were costing $40,000 to $50,000 per mile.

The States expressed their dissatisfaction with these provisions of the Act at the Richmond meeting of AASHO in December 1917, but the Administration, preoccupied with conducting the war, was unwilling to ask Congress for corrective legislation.

The Rift in the Good Roads Movement
The battle for Federal aid in the 64th Congress had been a contest between the proponents of long-distance improved highways and those who wanted only to get the farmer out of the mud. Neither side was really satisfied with the compromise embodied in the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act, and neither side approved wholly of the OPRRE’s efforts to administer the Act. The post road clause was the major concession in the law for the local roads people, and the OPRRE very obviously was sympathetic to the State highway departments’ efforts to eliminate compliance with it as a requirement for Federal aid.

The long-distance highway boosters regarded the OPRRE’s efforts to get the States to designate highway systems as inadequate to ever produce a national road system. In a number of States the systems were so extensive that it would take decades of Federal aid at the most optimistic rate of appropriation to bring them up to an acceptable interstate standard. And even with the benevolent intervention of the OPRRE, it was difficult to get the States to coordi- nate their systems with their neighbor States. The States were primarily interested in State systems, not national systems.

Before the war was over, the national road advocates decided to cut loose from Federal aid and pressure Congress for a national system under Federal control. They supported the Postmaster General’s motor express route proposal as a step in the right direction. And in October 1918, Senator George E. Chamberlain of Oregon introduced a bill “to provide for taking over, improvement, relocation, construction, and maintenance of a system of National highways and State highways, designed to facilitate the movement of troops, equipment, munitions, and supplies, and to promote the general welfare of the people of the United States.”^[41] This bill was buried in the Committee on Military Affairs, but it showed which way some winds were blowing.

In October 1918, the influential Engineering News-Record, which had formerly favored Federal aid, came out for a national highway system, declaring that the Federal-aid projects already approved by the OPRRE were so scattered that there was no hope that they could ever be connected into a workable national system.^[42] The editor declared that “The Federal road administration has too long been in a subordinate capacity, lost in a department—that of Agriculture—whose main interests are foreign to road work,” and went on to recommend that an autonomous commission similar to the Interstate Commerce Commission be set up to build and operate national highways.^[43]

The Postwar Highway Drive Begins
With the end of the war in sight, practically all of the States began preparations for a postwar road program. The highway atmosphere in late 1918 was entirely different from what it had been before the war. In Pennsylvania, where a bond issue for State highways had been defeated by 40,000 votes in 1913, an even bigger issue for $50 million carried by 180,000 votes in November 1918.^[44] Illinois proposed a $60 million bond issue to pay for a carefully selected 4,800-mile system of trunk highways, and it carried by a large majority.^[45]

In November 1918, Secretary of Agriculture Houston warned that the unexpended balances from the 1916 Federal-aid act would be inadequate to carry on an effective postwar road program in view of the enormous damage the country’s roads had sustained during the war, and the need for more and stronger roads. He recommended larger appropriations from the Federal treasury.

The postwar road program was the main theme of the Joint Highway Congress sponsored by the American Association of State Highway Officials and the Highway Industries Association and scheduled to be held at Chicago, December 11 and 12, 1918.

The Congress opened under a pall of sadness cast by the sudden death of Logan Waller Page, Director of the Bureau of Public Roads,^{[N 1]} and the foremost highway engineer of the United States. Page had died of a heart attack the night of December 9, 1918, during a meeting of the executive committee of AASHO, to the dismay of the State highway forces who had been counting on him to lead the drive for an expanded postwar Federal-aid program. Page had brought to the meeting a Federal-aid bill that had been drafted by the Administration and had the support of AASHO. It provided for re-wording the post road clause of the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, for authorizing 50 percent Federal participation in the cost of roads with no upper limit and for increasing appropriations by a total of $450 million over a 4-year period. Those favoring the continuation of Federal aid planned to seek the endorsement of the Joint Highway Congress for the Page bill.

↑ On July 1, 1918, the Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering had been elevated to the status of a bureau in the Department of Agriculture.

On the other side, the principal spokesman for national highways was Editor E. J. Mehren of the Engineering News-Record. He outlined a plan for a national highway system of 50,000 miles consisting of five east-west routes and ten north-south routes, which would include about 2 percent of all U.S. roads. This system would give every State at least one through north-south route and one through east-west route and would cost about $1.25 billion. With congressional appropriations of $100 million per year, it would take 12½ years to complete. Mehren recom- mended that Congress set up a Federal Highway Commission to build, maintain, and operate the system.^[46]

Still another plan was unveiled by James I. Blakslee, Fourth Assistant Postmaster General, for a Postal Motor Express System of 15,000 miles costing about $450 million which, he claimed, if authorized by Congress, would pay for itself out of surplus postal revenues.

The Joint Highway Congress, dominated by the American Automobile Association, the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, representatives of the emerging trucking industry, and other urban interests, passed a resolution favoring the Mehren plan for a national system. The outnumbered AASHO delegates then met in separate session, endorsed the Page bill and went on record as having “favored the making of all expenditures under the Federal-aid plan, the routes in the Federal system being selected by the various states and connected at the state lines by the Federal department in cases where connections are not made by the adjoining states.”^[47]

Unsuccessful Attempt in Congress to Extend Federal Aid for 3 Years
The Page bill, sponsored by Senator Swanson of Virginia, was one of six highway measures introduced when Congress convened in December 1918. One of these, also sponsored by Swanson, would authorize the Postmaster General to set aside one-half of the net proceeds from the operation of motor parcel post for the improvement of a system of Federal motor express routes. Another, by Senator Reed Smoot of Utah, would establish a National Academy of Highway and Bridge Engineering in Washington. The others were Federal-aid bills similar to the Page bill providing for augmentation of the funds provided in the original Federal Aid Road Act for fiscal years 1920 and 1921 and an extension of Federal aid through fiscal year 1924.

This last authority was important, for it would insure the continuation of the policy of Federal assistance and enable the States to plan an orderly program. It was, however, opposed by those who were against Federal aid to highways, and they were successful in confining the funds authorized to fiscal years 1919, 1920, and 1921 and reducing the total amount to $200 million. In addition, the rural road advocates imposed a limit of $20,000 per mile on Federal participation.

In this form, the road legislation was added as a rider to the Post Office Appropriation Bill for 1920 (40 Stat 1252), along with another provision authorizing the Secretary of War to transfer to the Secretary of Agriculture “all available war material, equipment, and supplies not needed for the purposes of the War Department, but suitable for use in the improvement of highways, and that the same be distributed among the highway departments of the several states to be used on roads constructed in whole or in part by Federal aid. . . .”

When this measure reached the floor of the House, the $200 million appropriation encountered only token resistance. Congress clearly felt some obligation to help repair the damage inflicted on the State roads by war traffic. “The interstate character of traffic, as well as its excessive volume, render inequitable the placing of the cost burden on individual States.”^[48] Also, there was consensus that public improvements would be needed to stimulate business and provide employment for returning veterans. Senator Swanson urged road improvements as a weapon for gaining a place for the United States in world markets. Good roads he said would save American producers $700 million annually and enable them to undersell foreign competitors.

The bill proposed that the term “rural post road” be construed to mean “any public road a major portion of which is now used, or can be used, or forms a connecting link not to exceed ten miles in length of any road or roads now or hereafter used for the transportation of the United States mails.” Unexpectedly, this clause aroused considerable opposition from the floor, and Senator Charles S. Thomas of Colorado declared that the bill “commits the United States to the improvement of every cattle trail, every cow path, and every right of way in the United States.” Senator James W. Wadsworth, Jr., of New York said, “I am convinced that any road that can be made suitable for carrying mail includes any and every road in the United States.”^[49] This, of course, was exactly the effect desired by the Administration when it proposed the amendment. The new post road definition ended the pretense that Federal aid for highways rested even in part on Congress’ constitutional power to establish a postal system. The feeble opposition was unable to change the bill, and it became law on February 28, 1919.

Only a few days before the passage of the Post Office Appropriation Bill Senator Charles E. Townsend of Michigan introduced his own highway bill to establish a Federal Highway Commission of seven members, each to be paid $10,000 per year, with power to establish a Federal highway system of not less than two trunkline roads in each State, suitably connected to the trunklines of adjacent States and counties. This bill, although lost by adjournment, was an omen of the coming battle over Federal aid in the 66th Congress.^[50]

Thomas H. MacDonald Selected to Head Bureau of Public Roads
While the Page bill was working its way through Congress, the Secretary of Agriculture was trying to fill the vacant position of Director of the Bureau of Public Roads. This was not an easy task, partly because of the prestige the position had acquired under Page and partly because of the meager salary of $4,500 Congress had allowed for the job, which was far below the compensation of many State highway executives. The American Association of State Highway Officials had recommended Thomas H. MacDonald, Chief Engineer of the Iowa State Highway Commission for the position, and MacDonald was willing to accept if more adequate compensation could be provided.

With roadbuilding severely limited during the war and a slow postwar start, many roads were still a quagmire each spring.

When nearly 4 months had passed without filling the position, the highway departments began to get restless, and some suggested that the hiatus in direction was affecting the work of the Bureau and delaying project approvals. This was denied, and on April 1, 1919, MacDonald was appointed “engineer in immediate charge of the work under the Federal aid road act” pending a reexamination by Congress of the Director’s compensation.^[51] On July 1, 1919, he was appointed to fill the vacant directorship, with the title of Chief of Bureau, at a salary of $6,000 per year.

Highway Building Gets Off to a Slow Start
Less than half a million dollars of the funds authorized by the Federal Aid Boad Act had been paid out to the States when the war ended in November 1918. This left $29.5 million available for fiscal year 1919, to which Congress added another $50 million in the Post Office Appropriation Bill. After deducting 3 percent for BPR Administration, about $77 million were available to the States for their 1919 programs.^[52]

Large as this sum seemed, it was only a small part of the funds voted for roads in 1919. Besides the $110 million already authorized in Pennsylvania and Illinois, Michigan, California, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and Nevada authorized another $114.8 million worth of bonds, and bond issues carried in dozens of counties, some for very large sums.^{[N 1]}^[54] Without counting the cities, which were also preparing large street programs, the funds available for new construction in 1919 were well over $400 million.^[55] This was about five times the amount spent under State supervision in 1918 for new construction.

For a variety of reasons, the States were slow getting started on their 1919 programs. Many did not have plans ready, and in some States, the bond funds and Federal-aid matching money did not become available until the construction season was well advanced. Early in the year there was a shortage of trained highway engineers.^{[N 2]} There was also a shortage of contractors and construction equipment.

↑ For example, on July 1, 1919, St. Louis County, Minnesota, approved $7.5 million of road bonds by a 9 to 1 margin. This was the largest sum ever authorized for roads in any county of the United States up to that time. About the same time the Dallas County, Texas, voters approved an issue of $6.5 million for road and bridge bonds. In both of these States, the counties were required to match Federal-aid funds rather than the State.^[53]
↑ At this time about one-fifth of all the trained highway engineers were still in the Army. The French Government had requested the United States to reconstruct the roads worn out by American military operations, and to do this the Army kept the engineer troops overseas the best part of the summer of 1919.

By the time road construction began to gain some momentum, the annual movement of coal from the mines to markets had begun and open top railroad cars, which had been plentiful in the spring, became scarce once again. This cut into the supplies of construction materials, and many contractors were unable to complete their contracts before winter set in. When the season ended, no more than half of the 1919 road program had been realized, and only $2.7 million of the available Federal aid had been earned by the States.

The failure of the States to measure up to public expectations was widely criticized. In defense, A. K. Hirst, President of the American Association of State Highway Officials, said,

Never, I believe, since the days of early railroad development have the American people been so determined to change instantly their means of transport and not even then were they so willing to pay the cost, provided they could get the results.
What are the results they are now demanding and what are some of the problems that grow from these demands?
They are expecting the States which had no highway organizations three or even two years ago, which had done no preliminary work and in some of which hardly a mile of modern rural highway had ever been built, to create an organization full sprung from the earth (like our imaginary defensive and aggressive army was to spring) and to build instantly hundreds of miles of modern roads costing millions upon millions of dollars. In the older States in the highway game, better prepared with organizations and contractors, and with some knowledge of materials and construction conditions, they are asking us to double, triple, or quadruple our annual output of roads.^[56]

The Debacle of 1920
Shutting their eyes to the obvious impossibility of performance, some States announced 1920 road programs that were even larger than those for 1919. Additional bond issues, plus the Federal aid authorized for fiscal year 1920 had, according to BPR estimates, boosted the road funds available to the States and counties to at least $663 million. A few sober voices warned of trouble ahead and advised the States to revise their programs downward to a realistic level or risk loss of public confidence.^[57] Others predicted that the highway program would put unbearable strains on the national economy which was already suffering from shortages of every kind. In particular, they said the competition for labor might lead to an agricultural disaster if the farmers could not get their crops planted and harvested.

Despite the warnings, the States began advertising road projects on a massive scale early in 1920, so as to be ready for construction as soon as the weather permitted in the spring. Very soon the market for road contracts was saturated; and as contractors became loaded, bids fell off and bid prices escalated alarmingly. High-type roads that had cost $20,000 per mile before the war, and which went for $40,000 per mile in 1919, went up to $49,000 and even higher. In Pennsylvania bids ranged from $52,500 to $91,500 per mile for concrete roads.

In March 1919, the State Auditor of Ohio asked the Highway Department to hold up contract awards pending a readjustment of economic conditions after 13 contracts for 44 miles of highway were offered with only two bids received. In May, the New York State Highway Department withdrew all highway projects not already awarded to contract “until the situation shows a decided change for the better.” Also in May, the Minnesota Commissioner of Highways ordered the counties to stop letting new work and concentrate on finishing projects already under contract.

Bond interest rates began to rise early in 1920. In April the City of Pittsburgh received no bids for a proposed issue of 4½ percent improvement bonds. California was unable to sell its highway bonds because State law fixed interest at not over 4½ percent and prohibited the sale of State bonds below par. While the legislature wrestled with the problem, all construction and even advance planning came to a stop.

With the opening of the construction season, other troubles developed in abundance. Contractors who had taken contracts anticipating delivery of equipment in the spring sat idle waiting for the equipment. (The road equipment producers were themselves having labor and materials problems and were far behind on their orders.) Open top railway cars became scarce early in the season because of construction demand, and not enough cars were available for hauling coal, causing localized coal famines. Because of coal shortage, some of the portland cement mills reduced production, causing a shortage of cement, with contractors scrambling wildly for the available supplies at soaring prices.

The cement shortage was particularly serious to the industrial eastern and north central States, which had suffered the most damage from heavy trucking during the war. They were convinced that only concrete pavements or brick surfaces on concrete bases could stand up to heavy truck traffic, and they were also dominated by the idea that their main roads should be of “permanent construction” that would “outlive the bonds.”

Delaware and Rhode Island, unable to get portland cement, changed their designs to bituminous concrete to utilize asphalt, which was still in reasonably good supply. Wisconsin, which had planned a 400-mile cement concrete road program, cut back to 200 miles.

To add to the States’ and contractors’ difficulties, the Interstate Commerce Commission in June 1920, gave the coal industry priority on open top cars, shutting down scores of road projects at the height of the construction season.

To keep going and to appease the public demand for highway construction, some States resorted to methods that would never have been countenanced in normal times. Some let contracts on a cost-plus-percentage, or cost-plus-a-fixed fee basis. Others set up force-account or day-labor organizations to do their own work. Temporary surfaces were laid on many projects in the expectation of better conditions in 1921 under which to do the final paving.^[58]

When the construction season ended in December 1920, not more than one-quarter of the anticipated program had been realized, and in some States, the accomplishment was less than 20 percent. However, it was possible to salvage some consolation from what appeared to be a massive failure.

First, the Federal-aid program had done much better than in any previous year with total payments to the States of about $35.44 million as compared to only $4.66 million in the previous 3 years.^[59]

Then, curtailed construction programs allowed the States to put more engineers on preparing surveys and plans for future work. Because of this enforced breathing spell, the States were able to get the unprecedented number of 1,286 projects, totaling 10,826 miles, ready for contract—twice as many as in all the previous years of the Federal-aid program. The estimated total cost of these projects was $197.6 million, with a Federal share of $85.9 million. This, according to Chief MacDonald, was a very desirable accomplishment:

. . . it has been fortunate for the future stability of the roadbuilding program that because of the limitations imposed there has been sufficient time to get the necessary engineering work done much more thoroughly than would have been possible had we gone hastily into a heavy construction program.^[60]

And finally, there was a rather general feeling that the slowdown would benefit everyone in the long run by taking the inflationary heat off labor rates and materials prices. The inability to get work under contract would almost certainly allow construction prices to stabilize so that the same funds would later buy more roads and bridges.

In the perspective of later events, the most significant development of 1919 and 1920 was a tremendous expansion of the highway construction business and the manufacture of road machinery. Encouraged by the prospect of a huge postwar highway program, literally hundreds of new contractors entered the highway field, and the old ones that had survived the war greatly expanded their capacity. Under the stimulus of high labor rates and acute labor shortage, the construction industry began an astounding mechanization which not only arrested the inflation in road prices, but in a few years brought them down to relatively low levels.

Federal Aid In Kind—The War Surplus Equipment
At the end of the war, the United States Government was the largest owner of motor trucks in the world, by a wide margin, and most of these vehicles were surplus to the peacetime needs of the Army. To the motor industry, this huge surplus of vehicles was a threat hanging over the postwar truck market. The highway people, on the other hand, looked upon these vehicles as a possible way to replace the vehicles worn out during the war.

Congress resolved the dilemma in four acts authorizing and directing the Secretary of War to transfer to the Secretary of Agriculture all vehicles, construction equipment, and supplies not needed by the military but suitable for use in improving the highways for distribution among the State highway departments. The only conditions imposed were that the States must request the equipment, pay transportation charges from where it was stored, and agree not to resell it.

This 2-ton Army ordinance truck was converted into a dump truck for highway construction use.

In June 1919, the Bureau of Public Roads, acting for the Secretary, allocated 20,519 motor trucks to the States; and by the end of July, a third of these had been delivered to them. By October 1920, a total of 22,719 surplus vehicles had been delivered. This windfall was a tremendous boost to the maintenance efforts of the States and counties, for it enabled them to haul stone and gravel for repairs when railway cars were unobtainable.

By 1921 the flow of war surplus to the States had become a broad stream, including not only motor trucks, “Fords,” and autos, but shop equipment, spare parts, and construction equipment of all kinds from hand shovels to steam shovels. Over 20,000 tons of explosives worth $10 million were distributed and enthusiastically applied to highway construction and quarry operations. One construction superintendent declared “The results of TNT in rock blasting are so far superior to those of any other explosive that we have found that an experienced powderman who has once used TNT can hardly be induced to use anything else.”^[61]

The massive distribution was substantially completed in 1925 by which time equipment and supplies worth $215 million had been given to the States and the BPR had retained for its own use equipment worth another $7.8 million.^[62]

The Defects of the Federal-Aid Program Exposed
The Federal-aid forces suffered serious defections in April 1919, when a group of national road advocates formed the Federal Highway Council.^[63] One of the organizers of this group was highly respected Henry G. Shirley, Chief Engineer of the Maryland State Roads Commission and one of the founders of AASHO. The avowed purpose of the Council was to get Congress to set up a system of national highways under Federal control such as that proposed by the Townsend bill. The backing for such a system came principally from the eastern and north central States that had suffered the most from wartime traffic. Most of these States had well-defined, limited State highway systems and strong highway departments; and they had for years concentrated much of their money on main intercity highways which were under the direct control of and maintained by the State. In these States Federal aid had been applied to the through routes with good effect.

The situation was quite different in 17 southern, prairie, and western States in which the counties were still the basic political units for building and maintaining roads. These States had created weak highway departments or commissions to receive and distribute the Federal-aid funds and had given them some powers to approve or disapprove standards, but these departments generally lacked the power to initiate projects and so to place the funds where they were most needed. Even worse, the legislatures of some States had directed that the Federal funds must be subapportioned among the counties according to a formula similar to the Federal-aid formula (⅓ according to area, ⅓ according to population, and ⅓ according to post road mileage). This split the limited amount of the State’s apportionment into fragments, each too small for a satisfactory project, a process that, according to Henry Shirley, would result in these States being “spotted with and not linked by Federally constructed highways.”^[64] In one southern State a sparsely populated county got only $4,000 of Federal aid in one year for its portion of the State highway system. At this rate, according to Shirley, it would take 100 years to complete one road across the county even though this road might also be an important link between important cities in adjoining States.

A drawback of the 1916 Federal Air Road Act was that federally aided roads need not have been connected.

Minnesota and Kansas were prohibited by their constitutions from engaging in works of internal improvement, and some southern States were legally unable to incur bonded debt. In these and a number of other States, the counties were required to put up also to pay for maintaining the roads afterward. This policy, according to the director of the American Automobile Association’s Good Roads Board, resulted in giving good “. . . roads in rich counties and in pauperizing poor counties.”^[65] Another result was that the completed roads in the poor counties were often poorly maintained and there was little the State highway departments could do about it other than threaten to withhold future Federal-aid funds.

To establish eligibility for Federal aid, the Secretary of Agriculture had required all States to designate State systems of main roads on which the Federal funds would be spent. These systems totaled 214,000 miles, or 8 percent of all U.S. roads. However, for individual States, the system mileage varied from less than 5 percent up to as much as 15 percent of the total existing mileage; and in some of the latter States the systems were so diffuse that it would take years to improve them, and even then they would not provide reasonably direct routes to important places in neighboring States.

Critics of Federal aid also liked to point out that, according to the official reports of the Bureau of Public Roads, three-quarters of the road mileage improved with Federal aid had low- or intermediate-type surfaces such as earth, sand-clay, gravel, or macadam which were incapable of carrying heavy truck traffic without excessive maintenance, and were, therefore, unsuitable as long-distance national roads. (However, the same reports showed that 65 percent of the funds were spent for high-type roads such as concrete and brick.)

Chief MacDonald was well aware of these shortcomings when he assumed office in 1919. He appreciated the need for a connected system of interstate highways, but he did not believe that a separate national system under a Federal commission or department was the way to achieve it. Such a system, he thought, would eventually absorb a very large part of the funds Congress was willing to vote for roads and, thus, weaken Federal aid to the States. MacDonald also questioned the assumption that long-distance highways were necessary for national defense, and in June 1920, he wrote :

There is no support for the assumption that long transcontinental roads will be needed for military defense, a transcontinental road which merely crosses the continent is of little military value. What is needed is a series of roads connecting all important depots, mobilization, and industrial centers, which, as thus connected, may give us a transcontinental route eventually ; but the transcontinental feature is of secondary importance.^[66]

The real need, in his mind, was to strengthen the State highway departments by giving them full control over both the Federal-aid matching funds and the maintenance of Federal-aid highways. In time, he believed long-distance highways would come into existence as the States improved their trunk highways, provided they could be persuaded to agree on a restricted mileage of interstate roads on which to concentrate the Federal-aid funds. The immediate problem was to bring about such an agreement and, thus, blunt the arguments of the national road advocates.

The BPR Begins National System Studies
MacDonald's handling of this problem was typical of his approach to many later ones. First, he obtained the support of the State highway departments by persuading Secretary Houston to set up a Federal-Aid Advisory Committee of six members recommended by the Executive Board of AASHO, of which MacDonald himself was a member.^[67] The members of the Advisory Board were from all parts of the country, and they all favored limited State road systems under the complete control of strong highway departments.

MacDonald then asked the War Plans Division of the Army General Staff and the Corps of Engineers to cooperate with the BPR to select those highways that were of national strategic or military importance; and when the military accepted this invitation, he supplied them with maps of all the States^{[N 1]} on which the BPR had plotted the tentative road systems submitted by the States and also all of the approved Federal-aid projects.^[68]^{[N 2]}

These preparations completed, MacDonald announced in March 1920, that the BPR, with support of the Advisory Committee was going to make a nationwide survey of the roads of the country and a classification of all highways in respect to their importance and character of service.^[69] This was necessary, he said, because the rate of improvement of the public roads is much slower than the public is de-manding; yet,

There must come a realization that only a percentage of the resources demanded for increasing the rate of road production can be provided for this purpose, and so the production of roads must be studied and programs determined the same as for any large industrial undertaking, and in order that the roads which meet the greatest economic needs will receive first consideration.^[70]

The survey, MacDonald said, would enable the Bureau and the States to segregate the roads into systems according to their national, State, county, or local importance, determine their needs for improvement, and allocate the costs of improvement and maintenance between the systems.

Meantime, the States were approaching a serious financial situation. Under the Bankhead Act of 1916 and the Post Office Appropriation Act of 1919, Congress had provided funds for Federal aid only through fiscal year 1921. When the 2d session of the 66th Congress opened in January 1920, Senator Chamberlain of Oregon introduced an Administration bill backed by AASHO which would have provided $100 million per year for Federal aid in fiscal years 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1924, with the provision that the money be concentrated on an adequate national highway system selected by the States and connected at the State lines. Senator Townsend also introduced his proposal for a Federal highway commission and a national highway system.

In committee, a measure known as the Sells bill, which provided funds for only fiscal year 1922, was substituted for the Chamberlain bill and was then passed by the House by a margin of almost 8 to 1. However, it failed narrowly in the Senate, and Congress adjourned without passing a highway bill. MacDonald warned of hardship ahead for the States:

The fact that a new apportionment of funds was not made in January 1921, made it impossible for the States to maintain an unbroken continuity of policy and administration in respect to Federal-aid work, and this condition has resulted in an unprecedented number of withdrawals, cancellations, and modifications of existing projects as the States have endeavored to adjust their programs to a reduced rate of expenditure. This condition has emphasized the fact that in so large and important a national policy as Federal aid implies, the action of the Federal Government should as nearly as possible be uniform, consistent, and prompt. The probable cost of administering Federal aid in the several States will no doubt be appreciably increased, owing to the fact that the States do not yet know whether Federal aid will be continued, under what conditions it will be continued, or what appropriation is likely to be made, so that it is practically impossible for them to make any definite plans with respect to the administration or financing of future work or to conduct the necessary studies preparatory to filing applications for additional aid.^[71]

↑ These base maps were prepared to a scale of approximately 8 miles to the inch by the Geological Survey. When that agency's appropriation was exhausted, MacDonald placed five of its cartographers on the BPR payroll to finish the job.
↑ Apparently the Post Office Department was not asked to participate in these studies even though at the time (March 1920) the Postmaster General was still engaged in experiments with motor parcel post and motor truck transportation of fourth class mail.

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.^[72]

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.^[73]

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.^[74]

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.^[75]

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.”^[76] These and other differences were smoothed out in conferences between the BPR and the individual States and by regional conferences between the States to coordinate across State boundaries. The first inter-State conference at Troy, New York, resulted in completely coordinated primary systems for New England, New York, and New Jersey.

↑ 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).

System selection and highway correlation were somewhat different in the west where population was scattered, road distances great, and financial resources very limited. “The designation of a system of roads in such States adequate at once to serve local requirements and at the same time correlate satisfactorily with the roads of adjoining States demands very careful adjustments in order to keep the mileage, the resources, and the service value of the roads properly balanced and economically justified.”^[77] In a few of the larger western States, three-sevenths of the total Federal-aid mileage was insufficient to make all of the connections to interstate roads in adjoining States, and some of the secondary Federal-aid mileage had to be used for this purpose.

The huge job of designating and approving all of the 48 State systems and correlating them across State lines was completed November 1, 1923, the work published by the Bureau of Public Roads in the form of a national map of the Federal- Aid Highway System. Because many States designated less than 7 percent of their total mileage on the Federal-aid system, the roads shown on this map totaled only 168,881 miles, or 5.9 percent of all U.S. roads. However, almost immediately, the system began growing and it has been growing ever since.^{[N 1]} By July 1923, Maryland, Delaware, and Rhode Island had completed their original systems to a satisfactory standard and had been granted increases by the Secretary.

The Bureau of Public Roads estimated that for the country as a whole at least 90 percent of the population resided not more than 10 miles from a Federal-aid road, and in a few States, this figure was as high as 97 or 99 percent. The BPR estimated that at least 94 percent of the cities of 5,000 or more population were directly on the system.^[78]

The Federal Highway Act concentrated a sizable amount of money on a limited mileage of roads, resulting in the rapid improvement of interstate routes. Fiscal year 1922 was a banner year in which nearly 14,000 miles of the Federal-aid system were improved. By July 1925, 46,486 miles, or over one-quarter of the system, had been brought up to a reasonably travelable standard.

However, the production of motor vehicles increased at an even more rapid rate. From 1916 to 1921 registrations increased at about 1.4 million per year. From 1921 to 1925 the rate increased to about 2.37 million per year, and in 1925 the total number of motor vehicles of all types registered was 19.95 million.^[79]^[80] With the increase in vehicle ownership, there came an immense increase in travel and tourism, and cross country motoring rapidly became the major recreational activity of millions of Americans.

The End of the Trails
The cross country wagon trails of the prerailroad era were a romantic episode in American history. These trails furnished the emigrants one essential service that outweighed all others—the assurance that if the traveler followed the trail, he would eventually arrive at his destination and not become lost.

When the Lincoln Highway Association was organized in 1913, this assurance was lacking for anyone so rash as to attempt a long overland trip, for the roads were almost completely unsigned and there were few reliable maps. Few residents along a road could give the traveler reliable information on the condition of the roads in the next county or even beyond a distance of 10 miles in their own county. By selecting and mapping the best roads over the most direct routes and by encouraging the local officials to improve them and the local auto clubs to mark them, the Lincoln Highway Association provided services of real value to motorists. The American Automobile Association augmented these services by publishing its famous “Blue Books,” advising tourists of the accommodations to be found along the route. In 1915 Lewis Stubbs of St. Joseph, Missouri, proposed marking auto trails by painting colored bands around utility poles, and the Automobile Club of St. Joseph marked a considerable mileage of the Pikes Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway, the “Appian Way of America,” in this manner.^[81]

The National Old Trails Association formed in 1913 was dedicated to preserving and improving the old Cumberland Road and the old Santa Fe Trail as a transcontinental route. In 1915 Carl Fisher was instrumental in organizing the Dixie Highway, a network of parallel roads extending from the Straits of Mackinac to Miami, Florida. Between 1914 and 1916 community boosters put together the Yellowstone Trail, under the slogan “A good road from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound,” with the Pikes Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway following in 1916.^[82]

Because they were marked and advertised, these pioneer auto trails became channels for the rising tide of tourist traffic. After World War I, competing auto trails burgeoned in scores. In the absence of an official marking system, these trails provided a useful service to motorists, even though they were established in large part to promote the commercial interests of their sponsors. But within a few years, the movement got out of hand as more and more trails were organized. By 1924 there were at least 250 marked trails sponsored by 100 or more separate organizations, each with a headquarters and issuing maps and promotional material and collecting funds. Some of these routes were interstate in character, some of only local significance. Some routes were promoted to further roadbuilding by arousing public opinion, some were purely scenic, and some existed only to provide salaries for their organizers.^[83]

↑ The Federal Highway Act provided that whenever a State had finished improving its entire original 7 percent system, the State, with the approval of the Secretary of Agriculture, could add additional increments. The Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932 modified this to provide that increments of 1 percent of total State road mileage could be added to the Federal-aid system whenever 90 percent of the original system plus all subsequent increments had been improved.

The trail organizations were highly competitive and their efforts were uncoordinated, resulting in numerous overlaps.

For example, 70 percent of one trail overlapped other marked routes and one trail overlapped as many as 11 others. One road carried eight different trail markers for a considerable distance. Many trails had alternate sections, compounding the confusion, and one had alternates following three separate roads, all with the same name. Most routes followed their financial support and it was impossible to integrate many of them into any logical highway system. ^[84]

The pressure of the trail associations for the improvement of their trails made sensible programing by the State highway departments almost impossible. The situation finally became so bad that in 1924 the American Association of State Highway Officials approved a resolution calling on the Secretary of Agriculture to name a board of BPE and State engineers to formulate a numbering and marking system of interstate character for the principal highways of the United States. In response to this resolution, the Secretary appointed a Joint Board of 21 State highway engineers and 3 BPR engineers under the chairmanship of Chief MacDonald with E. W. James as secretary.

Early in its work the Joint Board decided to confine the numbered routes to actual existing roads in the Federal-aid system, but to disregard the state of improvement of any road as a factor in putting it on the system. The Board pointedly avoided holding public hearings to avoid placing itself in the position of arbiter between competing trails.

The Joint Board sponsored six regional meetings at which each highway department had an opportunity to designate its most important routes and coordinate across State lines with its neighbors. When these recommendations were consolidated on a single map, they added up to a system of 81,096 miles, or 2.8 percent of the total existing road mileage. The Board then went over the State recommendations eliminating routes of doubtful interstate importance and finally arrived at a “skeleton system” of 50,137 miles which it submitted to the individual States for approval.

By this time the work of the Board had begun to attract popular attention and, to use the expression of the president of AASHO, “the Infernal regions began popping.” Every community of any size wanted to be on a numbered route, just as a generation earlier every town thought it a matter of life and death to be on a railroad. Under the influence of local pressure the skeleton system was fleshed out to 75,884 miles. This was the system that was recommended by the Joint Board to the Secretary of Agriculture in its final report and approved by him. The Secretary sent the report to AASHO recommending that the Association “take such necessary steps as might be feasible under their respective State laws to put the plan into operation.”^[85]

At its annual meeting in October 1925, AASHO delegated to its Executive Committee authority to make minor changes in the system recommended by the Joint Board ”as appeared necessary or desirable.” Immediately, requests for changes began to come in from the States, most of them inspired by the trail associations. The Executive Board acted on 142 such requests and approved additions which boosted the total system mileage to 96,626 miles. This system was approved by ballot of the States on November 11, 1926, and was immediately put into effect by all the States and marked with the familiar black and white shield markers which for almost 50 years have guided American motorists.

What became of the private trails? They were replaced by one or more U.S. numbered routes and, one by one, the trail associations, their work done, went out of business. However, for years afterward and even today, sections of road in many States continued to be called “Lincoln Highway,” “Yellowstone Trail,” “Dixie Highway,” etc.

REFERENCES

↑ Engineers At Washington Rush Work On Army Camps But There Is Much Delay, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 78, No. 12, June 21, 1917, p. 619.
↑ C. Upham, Car Shortage and Its Relation to Highway Work, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 79, No. 24, Dec. 13, 1917, p. 1099.
↑ Making Existing Facilities Do The Work — The Railroads’ Problem, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 1, Jan. 3, 1918, p. 4.
↑ Transportation Needs — Rail, Water, Highway, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 16, Apr. 18, 1918, p. 779.
↑ The Immediate Needs of the Railroads, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 4, Jul. 25, 1918, p. 166.
↑ Build Roads!, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 79, No. 3, Jul. 19, 1917, p. 98.
↑ Priority Order to Halt Road Construction, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 79, No. 18, Nov. 1, 1917, p. 855.
↑ Short Stretches vs. Through Routes, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 79, No. 25, Dec. 20, 1917, p. 1137.
↑ The First Motor Truck Convoy, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 1, Jan. 3, 1918, p. 3.
↑ Pennsylvania Keeps Roads Open For Motor Truck Convoy, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 9, Feb. 28, 1918, p. 408.
↑ G. Biles, Clearing Roads for Army Transport, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1918, p. 13.
↑ C. Cowen, How Ohio Handles Important Roads Broken Down By Huge Traffic, Public Roads, Vol. 1, Nos. 6-8, Dec. 1918, p. 26.
↑ Action By The State Highway Officials, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 79, No. 24, Dec. 13, 1917, p. 1087.
↑ Secretary Houston Will Urge Vital Road Work, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 3, Jan. 17, 1918, p. 140.
↑ Government Operation And What It Means, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 3, Jan. 3, 1918, p. 5.
↑ McAdoo Will Aid In Transporting Road Materials, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 8, Feb. 21, 1918, p. 381.
↑ What Most Highway Departments Will Face In The Near Future, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 15, Apr. 11, 1918, p. 693.
↑ W. Thompson, New Jersey, One Of The Great Sufferers, Plans To Meet Needs Of The Future, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 2, Jun. 1918, p. 21.
↑ W. Sohier, Massachusetts Sees The Solution In Limits Upon Capacity And Loads Of Trucks, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 2, Jun. 1918, p. 13.
↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1919, p. 5.
↑ Truck Facts For 1927 (National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, New York, 1927) p. 10.
↑ Carrying Your Terminal Facilities With You, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 79, No. 24, Dec. 13, 1917, p. 1985.
↑ Motor Trucks Needed To Supplement, Not Compete, With Highways, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 82, No. 3, Jan. 16, 1919, p. 120.
↑ J. Wallace, Unit Operation Of Terminal Zones Urged, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 80, No. 16, Apr. 18, 1918, p. 779.
↑ Industry’s Use Of Highways And Motor Trucks To Relieve Freight Congestion, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 79, No. 22, Nov. 29, 1917, p. 1033.
↑ Developing Freight Routes on Highways With Motor Trucks and Trailers, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 2, Jul. 11, 1918, p. 106.
↑ Highway Carries Twelve Times As Much Local Freight As Railroad, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 5, Aug. 1, 1918, p. 224.
↑ Contract Let For Motor-Truck Transportation Of Coal, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 24, Oct. 3, 1918, p. 647.
↑ Comparison Of Short-Haul Truck And Rail Shipments, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 82, No. 19, May 8, 1919, pp. 903, 904.
↑ Editorial, American Motorist, Vol. 7, No. 4, Jul. 1915, p. 436.
↑ Joint Resolution Making Appropriations for the Post Office Department for Fiscal Year 1916 (38 Stat 1227).
↑ H. Doc. 159, 65th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 2.
↑ 39 Stat 424.
↑ Regional Highway Transport Directors Meet, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 13, Sept. 26, 1918, p. 599.
↑ Report Shows Results Of Motor Parcel Post Service, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 2, Jul. 11, 1918, pp. 90-91.
↑ Id., pp. 90-92.
↑ 40 Stat 753.
↑ Cong. Rec. 65th Cong., 3d Sess., Vol. 57, App., p. 386.
↑ P. Wilson, Operations of Bureau of Public Roads Under the Federal Aid Road Act, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 10, Feb. 1919, p. 22.
↑ S. R. 666, 65th Cong., 3d Sess., p. 3.
↑ Cong. Rec. 65th Cong., 2d Sess., Vol. 56, pp. 11, 311.
↑ Wanted—A Connected National Highway System, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 14, Oct. 3, 1918, p. 608.
↑ Post-War Highway Drive Begins, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 20, Nov. 14, 1918, pp. 878, 879.
↑ Report of The State Highway Department of Pennsylvania, 1917-1920 (J. L. L. Kuhn, Harrisburg, 1922) p. 15.
↑ Second Administrative Report of The Directors of Departments For The Year July 1, 1918-June 30, 1919 (Illinois State Journal Co., Springfield, 1919) p. 204.
↑ E. Mehren, A Suggested National Highway Policy and Plan, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 25, Dec. 19, 1918, p. 1115, 1116.
↑ National Highway System Gets Strong Backing, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 25, Dec. 19, 1918, p. 1108.
↑ S. R., supra, note 40, p. 10.
↑ 57 Cong. Rec 2427 (1919).
↑ Id., p. 3635.
↑ New Roads Official Named, Public Roads, Vol. 1, No. 11, Mar. 1919, p. 3.
↑ BPR, supra, note 20, p. 8.
↑ Largest County Bond Issue, Public Roads, Vol. 2, No. 15, Jul. 1919, p. 7.
↑ A. Anderson, State Highway Mileages And Expenditures in the Year 1918, Public Roads, Vol. 2, No. 15, Jul. 1919, p. 3.
↑ Authorized Road Bond Issues Total Nearly $500,000,000, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 84, No. 4, Jan. 22, 1920, p. 202.
↑ A. Hirst, The American Highway Problem, Public Roads, Vol. 2, No. 20, Dec. 1919, p. 6.
↑ Curtailed Highway Construction, Shall It Be Voluntary Or Enforced?, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 84, No. 10, Mar. 4, 1920, p. 451.
↑ P. Sargent, The President’s Address, Public Roads, Vol. 3, No. 32, Dec. 1920, p. 6.
↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1920, p. 5.
↑ T. MacDonald, Federal-Aid Accomplishments, Public Roads, Vol. 3, No. 32, Dec. 1920, p. 14.
↑ L. Smith, TNT A Success In Road Work, Public Roads, Vol. 3, No. 31, Nov. 1920, p. 13.
↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1925, p. 28.
↑ Federal Highway Council Formed, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 82, No. 16, Apr. 17, 1919, p. 790.
↑ Why Federal Aid Will Not Build A National Highway System, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 84, No. 7, Feb. 12, 1920, p. 336.
↑ M. Eldridge, Federal Highway Appropriations, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 86, No. 6, Feb. 10, 1921, p. 272.
↑ T. MacDonald, Four Years Of Road Building Under The Federal-Aid Act, Public Roads, Vol. 3, No. 26, Jun. 1920, p. 13.
↑ BPR, supra, note 20, p. 34.
↑ BPR, supra, note 59, p. 7.
↑ Highway Classification Undertaken by Bureau of Public Roads, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 84, No. 13, Mar. 25, 1920, p. 635.
↑ Id.
↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1921, pp. 6, 7.
↑ 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.
↑ Id.
↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1923, p. 3.
↑ Motor Vehicle Registration 15,092,177, Public Roads, Vol. 5, No. 2, Apr. 1924, p. 16.
↑ Motor Vehicle Registrations, Revenue And Gasoline Taxes For The Year 1925, Public Roads, Vol. 7, No. 2, Apr. 1926, p. 50.
↑ Ask A.A.A. Recognition for Pike’s Peak Route, American Motorist, Vol. 7, No. 4, Apr. 1915, p. 232.
↑ V. Stevenson, American Highways, Vol. 1, (Winship Publishing Co., New York, 1919) pp. 13-17.
↑ E. James, Making And Unmaking A System Of Marked Routes, American Highways, Oct. 1933, p. 16.
↑ F. Cron, Touring By Numbers—Why and How, Public Works, Feb. 1968, p. 80.
↑ E. James, Marking Our Highway System, American Highways, Oct. 1931, p. 19.

[5] It was estimated that in 1916 an average carload of less-than-carload package freight was only 7 tons, whereas the capacity of a properly loaded car was several times that amount.^[4]

[7] In 1917 there were 391,000 motor trucks registered in the United States, most of them used in the cities.

[27] In normal times the terminal charges for rail freight were 15 to 45 cents per ton, depending on the commodity and the terminal. Once loaded on cars, mainline railroads could haul freight for only 2% mills per ton-mile, and even low-traffic branch lines could haul for 2 or 3 cents per ton-mile. In 1916, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s average system operating cost was 4.3 mills per ton-mile, including terminal charges.^[23] Railroad men estimated that an average railroad car traveled about 25 miles per day, spending 12 hours in terminals for every hour of movement between terminals.^[24]

[35] The dispatch of rural mail by automobile began July 1, 1915, at Quarryville, Pennsylvania. The vehicles were required to be of at least 80 cubic feet capacity and able to carry 800 pounds of mail.^[30] In 1915 carriers serving motor vehicle routes that were at least 50 miles long, 6 days per week, received $1,800 per year. Carriers serving horsedrawn vehicle routes at least 24 miles long received $1,200 per year. All carriers were required to furnish their own transportation.^[31]

[43] Of 187 male employees on the rolls when war was declared, 52 or 28 percent had entered the military service by June 1918. When the war ended, 79 were in the service.

[51] On July 1, 1918, the Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering had been elevated to the status of a bureau in the Department of Agriculture.

[60] For example, on July 1, 1919, St. Louis County, Minnesota, approved $7.5 million of road bonds by a 9 to 1 margin. This was the largest sum ever authorized for roads in any county of the United States up to that time. About the same time the Dallas County, Texas, voters approved an issue of $6.5 million for road and bridge bonds. In both of these States, the counties were required to match Federal-aid funds rather than the State.^[53]

[63] At this time about one-fifth of all the trained highway engineers were still in the Army. The French Government had requested the United States to reconstruct the roads worn out by American military operations, and to do this the Army kept the engineer troops overseas the best part of the summer of 1919.

[76] These base maps were prepared to a scale of approximately 8 miles to the inch by the Geological Survey. When that agency's appropriation was exhausted, MacDonald placed five of its cartographers on the BPR payroll to finish the job.

[78] Apparently the Post Office Department was not asked to participate in these studies even though at the time (March 1920) the Postmaster General was still engaged in experiments with motor parcel post and motor truck transportation of fourth class mail.

[85] 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).

[89] The Federal Highway Act provided that whenever a State had finished improving its entire original 7 percent system, the State, with the approval of the Secretary of Agriculture, could add additional increments. The Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932 modified this to provide that increments of 1 percent of total State road mileage could be added to the Federal-aid system whenever 90 percent of the original system plus all subsequent increments had been improved.

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