America's Highways 1776–1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program/Part 2/Chapter 3
What Do We Mean—Highway Planning?
Everyone plans. One may spend hours and days planning a vacation trip abroad. A housewife plans constantly—from the trip to the store for the week’s supply of groceries to the time to put the vegetables on the stove for dinner. Engineers locate and design a section of road and portray their results by a construction plan. And perhaps the ultimate example is the successful result of planning to land a man on the moon and return him to earth.
Highway planning, however, is different. In most cases the individual, or even a huge organization such as the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, is planning something he or it expects to do. The ultimate result of highway planning, more recently broadened to be called highway transportation planning, is the development of a highway system to provide for the movement of vehicles—vehicles not under the control of the planner but of the great number of individuals who drive them. Highway transportation is mostly, up to 96 percent, people driving themselves or transporting their goods in their own vehicles. The highway planner plans a system and the engineer builds and maintains it, but they do not provide highway transportation. A railroad company provides transportation; an airline provides transportation; a transit company provides transportation; but the highway agency provides for transportation.
From another viewpoint, the question sometimes is raised as to whether we in the United States do any highway planning. It is reasoned that there were over 2,350,000 miles of rural roads and city streets at the time of the advent of the automobile, so what we have been doing for some 75 years is highway improvement planning. Literally that is nearly true, for most of the mileage added has been in the expanding suburban areas, with little planning, at least by highway planners, and most of the planning has been directed toward upgrading the early roads on or close to their original locations. Notable exceptions are seen in the Interstate System, which surely is a system planned by highway planners for highway transportation, and in the great undeveloped State of Alaska where new routes are being laid out to permit development of its natural resources. So compared to the many underdeveloped countries, the United States has in effect been doing not highway planning, but highway improvement planning.
Even in view of these qualifications, however, for the purposes of this chapter, the term highway planning will be used in a generic sense and will include whatever is done by the highway planners in facilitating highway transportation, coordinating it with other modes, and helping make it compatible with social and community values, whether the community be the smallest town, a metropolitan area, or the entire Nation. 
The coordination between the California DOT and the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, from planning through construction of over 11 miles of rail and highway facilities, saved the taxpayers millions of dollars, caused a minimum of disruption to the communities, and made the best use of the land by evaluating shared social values and esthetics for the benefit of all.
Early Highway Planning
This discussion of highway planning will be devoted primarily to the period beginning in 1934, the year of the passage of the Hayden-Cartwright Act (Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona and Representative Wilburn Cartwright of Oklahoma) that made highway planning possible on an organized and formal basis. Yet planning obviously was an essential feature of highway development even in colonial days.
Before the railroads put a temporary end to highway development, roads were definitely planned to meet such specific needs as connecting principal cities and opening new territory to development or for military purposes. The birth of highway transportation as we know it probably can be dated as 1893, when J. Frank Duryea first drove his gasoline buggy on the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts. Roads until then were being improved generally in short sections radiating from towns and railroad shipping points and were primarily for the movement of farm products. The availability of the automobile, first usable only in towns and cities and as “pleasure” vehicles, soon brought demands for improvement of larger sections, and especially in the eastern States, connecting the towns with one another.
It was this demand for connecting or trunk roads that brought about the first real differences among highway users, and what might be called the first highway planning—whether to concentrate on the trunk roads or continue to extend the radius of the farm-to-market roads. The question was settled early in the small eastern States in favor of the former rather than the farmer. In 1903 Rhode Island adopted a definite system of State highways for construction by the State Board of Public Roads. A similar proposal in Connecticut in 1901 was finally enacted in 1913, while Maryland in 1908 adopted an intercounty seat trunkline system, the first to be placed under State control for both construction and maintenance. Similar actions in the central and western States followed, only slowly, however, where towns were farther apart and service to farms generally more important than trunkline roads.
Again, as noted in earlier chapters, pressure developing from farm groups, city “pleasure” vehicle owners and, almost strangely, the League of American Wheelman led the Congress in 1916 to authorize funds for the improvement of rural post roads.
Two outstanding features of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act were the basis of apportionment of Federal funds and the requirement that the States must have or establish a State highway department adequately equipped to receive and administer the funds. The apportionment formula prevented any “pork barrel” distribution of funds by the Federal agency (but not necessarily at State level). The requirement of a State agency through which funds would be applied to road improvement was with the intent of bringing about the progressive development of a connected system of roads. These provisions were included as a result of the experience of the Office of Road Inquiry and several of the States that had already designated State highway systems. At that time, however, the Congress was not ready to accept as a requirement that all States must have State highway systems.
The importance of the system concept still ranked high in the thinking of the Office of Public Roads, however, and in reaching toward this concept, the Secretary of Agriculture required all States to submit programs of improvements proposed over the 5 years of the original authorization of Federal-aid funds for highways and also to file with the Office of Public Roads a “tentative” system on which the improvements would be made. So to this small degree, planning was already in evidence.
The trucks rolled on, but the scarcity of materials and men for maintenance made it an impossible task for these two men to accomplish much more than to clear the culvert of debris.
Hardly had the program gotten underway when came World War I. To read at this time a recitation of the effect of the war on the highway program is to recall how well these same words could have been used in describing the effect of World War II on the highway program of that period. In a speech before the American Society of Civil Engineers, Mr. MacDonald said:[N 1]
The Federal-aid work had scarcely begun, however, when the world war intervened and practically put a stop to all operations; and the war did a number of other things to the existing improved roads which, however disastrous they may have appeared at the time, have turned out to blessings in disguise. At the outset the construction and maintenance of highways were declared to constitute a non-essential industry. As a consequence new construction, except as required for the immediate service of the army, was greatly curtailed. Maintenance also was greatly hampered by the difficulty of obtaining the necessary materials and the scarcity and high wages of labor. At the same time there was released upon roads generally inadequate to stand it an unprecedented traffic of heavy motor trucks. To this experience and the heavy damage which followed we owe the development of most of the sound principles and policies which now govern the improvement of highways.
The first result was a strong reaction against the use of heavy motor trucks. There were large numbers of people who, forgetting that a road is of service only in so far as it accommodates the need for economical transportation, demand that the manufacture and operation of vehicles too heavy for the existing roads be prohibited. As few of the roads were designed to carry motor truck traffic, to have taken this course would have amounted to the throttling of a new development In transportation before it had a chance to demonstrate its utility, and it was rightly opposed with great energy by the manufacturers of motor vehicles. The latter, on the other hand, took a position at the opposite extreme from which they demanded the right to manufacture and sell vehicles of large capacity and heavy weight, without regard to the strength of the roads, on the theory that the greater the capacity of the vehicle the smaller would be the cost of operation per unit of capacity. The slogan was, ‘build the roads to carry loads,’ and this was met by the opposite party with the equally dogmatic demand that the loads should be limited to the capacity of the existing roads.
The issue thus joined, the principals to the controversy—highway officials on the one side and the manufacturers on the other—wisely agreed to submit their differences to the test of mutual discussion; and out of the series of conferences which ensued there came an agreement upon certain fundamental facts and principles which have served as the basis for a harmonious cooperation of the two groups, and which now constitute the foundations of highway improvement policy in all States.[1]
- ↑ This quotation and much of the material for the early history of highway planning are drawn primarily from papers of Chief MacDonald and Mr. H. S. Fairbank.
The wartime experience was felt in another way also. It was during this period that an intrepid team drove a truck from Detroit to Washington to demonstrate the value to the military of motor transport. This journey, almost an expedition in those days, represents the birth of a new concept of mobility. It demonstrated the value of a connected system of highways. As much as any other factor, it brought about what is now recognized as the most significant feature of Federal aid to highways, the requirement that funds be expended only on a Federal-aid system recommended by the States and approved by the Secretary of Agriculture, the Department within which the Bureau of Public Roads was then located.
This requirement was set forth in the 1921 Federal Highway Act, and reflected the acceptance of the earlier views as to the essentiality of concentrating highway expenditures on a limited system, then set at 7 percent of the total highway mileage of each State. The Act also recognized another national purpose for Federal aid—to serve possible military needs. While later it came to be accepted that the highway system’s military value lay more in aiding in the movement of the materials and products of war industries than in the movement of strictly military vehicles, this Act inspired the selection, by cooperative action of the Bureau of Public Roads and the War Department, of a system of routes of military importance to be included in the Federal-aid system. This system, ultimately portrayed in the “Pershing Map” (General Pershing accepted the responsibility for this effort) served as the basis for the so-called “strategic network” on which Federal-aid funds were to be concentrated during World War II. Thus, the 1921 Act opened the door to another planning effort—the selection of principal highway systems, statewide and national.
World War I also opened the door to another planning area, economic planning. The “harmonious co-operation” of roadbuilders and truck manufacturers had led to the adoption of a limit of 7½ tons as the capacity of vehicles for future production, a figure deemed fair to both (the user being omitted from consideration, evidently). Again quoting Chief MacDonald:
. . . It was recognized clearly for the first time that the cost of highway transportation is made up of the cost of the highways and the cost of operating the vehicles over the highways, and it was agreed that the common purpose of the public highway officials, vehicle manufacturers and operators should be to reduce the total cost of transportation rather than one or the other of the elemental costs. It could be proved that the number of large-capacity trucks already using some of the highways, principally those radiating from and connecting the larger cities—had already grown to the point where the combined savings in operating cost would more than balance the greater cost of providing highway service for them. As to those highways there could be little doubt of the wisdom and economy of building a type of surface adequate for the heavy truck traffic. Other roads, similarly located with respect to cities, had not yet developed a sufficient amount of the heavy traffic to repay the additional cost of the stronger construction, but it was not difficult to foresee that such a condition would develop in the future. On the majority of the roads however, the development of traffic of sufficient weight to justify the higher types of construction was very remote; and it was apparent that the one-time prevailing condition of uniformity of traffic on all roads had been definitely broken down. Instead, a new and much different condition had arisen under which the main intercity roads were found to be carrying traffic far in excess of the much greater mileage of local roads.
Under the new condition the economic justification for the improvement of the main roads lay to a far greater extent than formerly in the reduction of transportation costs and to a lesser degree in the effect upon the value of property. The main roads had become through traffic arteries, as distinguished from the more numerous local roads which continued to be of value primarily through the service they render in giving access to the land.[2]
From the point of view of highway planning, one other important feature emerged from the war and early postwar experience — the matter of highway finance. Recognition that State highways accommodated most through traffic and that the level of their improvement should be based on total transportation cost gave responsibility for financing the improvement logically to users, to be supported by motor-vehicle license fees and excise taxes and the motor-fuel taxes then beginning to come into more widespread acceptance. Local roads primarily serving farms were considered to be the responsibility of property owners served, with the financing coming primarily from real estate taxes, either on the property served or on the entire community.
The experience gained during the first decade following the 1916 Act pointed the direction highway planning would take. The earliest efforts were in the area of traffic counting. Observations included not only the numbers of vehicles, but their classification (passenger cars and trucks of various sizes) to aid in road design and State of registration to provide some gage of lengths of trips and the proportion of travel that was interstate in character as a measure of the propriety of Federal aid. The findings of these surveys coupled with results of the physical research being undertaken, described in Chapter 4, gave the means to get on with the early economic studies perceived to be so important in decisions with respect to degree of improvement to be provided and to the appropriate sharing of the costs.
Connecticut conducted this traffic census during the period September 1922–1923.
Traffic counting is not modern phenomenon, dating back at least to the Romans. But modern traffic volume counting began not too long after the beginning of the automobile era. Certainly by the early 1920’s many States and cities were making at least sporadic traffic counts. Maine, for example, as early as 1916 began counting traffic for one week each year at 58 stations and was one of the first States to make a statewide survey (in 1924) for the purpose of developing the State highway system. California has a long history of counting at hundreds of stations for one day each summer, using maintenance crews, a practice continued well after the automatic traffic counter had come into general use.
Concern was not limited to rural areas, for Cook County in Illinois, with the Bureau of Public Roads cooperating, conducted a traffic survey in 1924 and used the results to develop a constructive program. Ohio, following generally the Maine method, carried out a full year statewide survey in 1925. The first metropolitan area traffic counting, also with Bureau of Public Roads cooperation, was conducted in the Cleveland area in 1927.
With this background, the Bureau of Public Roads entered into agreements with several States in the late 1920’s for cooperative traffic surveys, the Bureau usually supplying the supervision and the States the counting personnel. The New England States were among the early participants in these cooperative studies, presumably because of their relatively higher traffic volumes, but the most ambitious survey of this period involved the 11 western States[N 1] in a simultaneous program. Here the Bureau joined with the States in providing field supervision and, in the Washington Office, did much of the analysis and forecasting of traffic volumes. Efforts to move on from the traffic volumes forecast route by route to recommended programs to meet the traffic demands proved to be considerably less than successful, however, primarily because of uncertainties in forecasting (the use of motor-fuel consumption as a good indicator of traffic growth was still in trial stage) and inadequate knowledge of the capacities and condition of existing roadways.
- ↑ Washington, Oregon, California, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico.
The Highway Planning Surveys
With the growing recognition of the need for more facts about highway program accomplishments to date and to establish a basis for estimating the direction and financial magnitude of future programs, the Bureau of Public Roads and some States had been considering the possibility of a broad data collection effort. Their deliberations bore fruit by the inclusion in the 1934 Federal-Aid Highway Act of the following wording:
Sec. 11. With the approval of the Secretary of Agriculture, not to exceed 1% per centum of the amount apportioned for any year to any State . . . may be used for surveys, plans, and engineering investigations of projects for future construction in such State, either on the Federal-aid highway system and extensions thereof or on secondary or feeder roads.
Though the word “planning” does not appear in this section, it is the basic and still controlling legislation that authorizes the ongoing highway (or now-termed highway transportation) planning process. The percentage figure has remained the same, but the “may” has been changed to “shall.” In addition, an optional ½ percent of all funds, except Interstate, has been made available for planning and research purposes. To avoid the appearance of directing how a State shall expend its own funds, with the change from “may” to “shall” was added the provision “with or without State matching.” While in the early years one State or another did not match Federal aid, these were the exceptions and now all States at least fully match, and many “over match,” Federal-aid planning funds, indicating the essentiality of the planning function.
But to get to the avoidance of the word “planning,” the reason lay in the fact that the word had come into disrepute in many sections of the country, and even in Washington, due no doubt to the increasing centralization of authority in Washington as the country was still struggling to emerge from the Depression. So the words “surveys, plans, and engineering investigations of projects for future construction” were in effect a euphemism for the word “planning.” While some States tried to interpret the wording as authorizing the funds for preliminary surveys and preparation of construction plans, the intent of those supporting the legislation and of the Public Works Committees of the Congress was clear, and Chief MacDonald yielded at no time to the use of the funds for anything less than the broad planning process envisioned by the Bureau.
The 1934 Act contained another provision of immense importance to the rural residents, an importance probably not fully appreciated at the time. In the paragraph authorizing appropriations appeared the words:
Provided further, That not less than 25 per centum of the apportionment to any State shall be applied to secondary or feeder roads, including farm to market roads, rural free delivery mail roads, and public-school bus routes . . .
As in the 1916 Act, there was no requirement for the designation of a system, the authorization being simply for roads of particular classifications with no limit as to mileage. The Congress did not until years later specifically authorize or require the designation of a secondary system, for the authorizations regularly continued were for “secondary or feeder roads.” The Defense Highway Act of 1941, however, evidently assuming that the roads had formed a system, authorized the extension of the Federal-aid system and the Secondary Road System to include all roads on the strategic network to permit the application of Federal-aid highway funds for their improvement. It was not until the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 that the Congress “Provided, That these funds shall be expended on a system of such roads selected by the State highway departments in cooperation with the county supervisors, county commissioners, or other appropriate local road officials and the Commissioner of Public Roads.” Nevertheless, with the experience of 1916 to 1921 still fresh in mind, the Bureau of Public Roads administratively determined that the States must designate systems on which the secondary funds might be programed, initially setting the mileage limit at 10 percent of the rural highway mileage. The 1944 Act in effect confirmed this early administrative decision and at the same time acceded to the growing pressure from local officials to have a say in the selection of routes to be improved with secondary funds.
It was under these conditions in 1934 and 1935, with highway planning formalized by legislation, that H. S. Fairbank began planning for planning. Fairbank, who impressed all who knew him as a brilliant man, a man of broad vision, the most fluent writer of Public Roads’ history, was an engineer and a scholar, yet a practical man. He was indeed the “father” of highway planning. He personally sketched out the data collection and analytical processes, leaving only the details to be worked out by his subordinates (whom he preferred to think of as colleagues). And through the early years he wrote and spoke strongly and often in behalf of the planning concept and in encouraging not only its adoption but its use in policy, administrative, and engineering decisions.
Fairbank made it clear that the early work was not planning but the collection and analysis of data to be used in planning, and the agreements between the States and the Bureau were for the purpose of conducting highway planning surveys of three broad types—road inventory, traffic, and financial and road use. As a parenthetical note, it is when one advances from data collection and analysis to forecasting the future that one advances from surveying to planning.
The inventory phase involved driving over every mile of rural highway, recording its width, type, and condition; on the more important routes the geometric features such as curves, grades and sight distances; all farms, residences, businesses, industrial plants, schools, hospitals, and any other cultural feature that the roads must serve. All the information was to be recorded on inch-to-the-mile county maps, and the data tabulated in a variety of ways for analytical use.
The traffic surveys were built on the cooperative traffic surveys described earlier but underwent considerable improvement in method as automatic traffic counting equipment, a better understanding of road design requirements, and improved statistical procedures became available. Basically they involved intensive traffic volume counting on main routes, less intensive counting on secondary roads and spot checks on lightly traveled local roads. At all stations, vehicles were classified as to type, and on the main roads a sampling of commercial vehicles was weighed on portable scales, their cargoes classified, their origins and destinations ascertained, and their tare weights recorded where known. Origins and destinations of passenger cars were also sampled. All these data were to be tabulated in various ways and shown on appropriate maps. They served to show the service highways were providing, the vehicle miles of travel and ton miles of goods and products moved, the lengths and purposes of trips, and average and peak hour volumes for design purposes. When coupled with the road inventory data, they showed the adequacy of the existing roads to provide for the movement of traffic and to serve the needs of rural land use, particularly farms. They permitted estimates of the cost of bringing road conditions up to a standard regarded as suitable for current traffic and, to the extent it could be forecast, future traffic.
Measuring sight distances and curvature on existing highways to get data to be used in planning.
The third general area involved the recording of expenditures and revenues for highways and all other purposes from all units of government, including special districts, to ascertain the degree to which user and other taxes were being applied to road purposes by the individual units and, more generally, by the various levels of government. These studies would show the degree to which the main roads were in fact supported by the users as the theorists then thought appropriate, and the local roads by property or general taxes. Today it is recognized that it is only at the extremes that the theory can fully operate—freeways as a user responsibility and the dead end road or street as a land service or community responsibility—with the great mass of roads in between deserving some support from each source since all such roads serve both purposes. In 1934, however, there were no facts at all on which even to estimate the propriety of highway finance of the day. In addition, the financial survey included road-use studies which determined from a sample of owners of vehicles in places of various sizes the usage they made of roads in the different systems. This might show, for example, the use of rural roads by urban residents compared to the use of city streets by rural residents, to the end of appraising the propriety of the allocation of funds collected by various levels of government to the several road systems. Also included in the financial surveys were road life studies, which permitted estimates of the physical life of the roads constituting the highway “plant.”
New Mexico participated in an ambitious traffic survey in 1930 with 10 other States.
Obviously, carrying out Fairbank’s bold plan would be an enormous task requiring much manpower, and it might well not have been begun had not at least three significant items conjoined.
First, the country was still deep in the Depression. “Make work” programs were being sought, and funds for highway improvements were being made available as works relief programs. One and one-half percent of these funds added to similar percentages of regular funds then made available under the Hayden-Cartwright Act provided substantial funding from highway sources.
Second, the works relief funds for white-collar projects offered Work Projects Administration (WPA) officials the opportunity to place many needy people in jobs.
Third, the surfacing of the Federal-aid systems in most States was well along toward completion, and administrators were feeling pressures to extend road improvements to the less important roads. The 1934 Act gave them this opportunity, but by requiring that the States select a secondary system, the need for the planning survey was obvious. In fact, Fairbank suggested that providing facts on which to select the secondary system would be a main object of the effort. But at the same time Fairbank bore down heavily on the idea that roads were never “completed” but must be maintained, surfaces replaced, and the whole system upgraded to meet new demands of a growing traffic. And the planning surveys were to provide the data that would permit planning this continuing process.
So with the need for this new concept—planning—constantly emphasized by the Bureau, with the procedures formulated, and with funding and manpower at hand, work was begun. The first State to get underway was Pennsylvania in September 1935, closely followed by Ohio in October of that year, and other States joining in quickly thereafter.
With this planning survey process new and not uncomplicated, it was expected that the Bureau of Public Roads would be able to help the States by sending people experienced in the earlier cooperative traffic surveys to assist in starting the field work, anticipating that States would accept the new concept but slowly, perhaps five or six States in a year. But once begun, States followed one another in quick succession, some appreciating the need and the opportunity to meet it, and others influenced by the growing number of other States undertaking the work. In fact officials of one State remarked that “We heard that ________________ [State name omitted by choice] was starting one of these planning surveys and so we thought we should have one too, whatever it is.” But for whatever reason, by September 1936, only a year after the first survey was launched, 38 States had come into agreement with the Bureau and actually started field work. The schedules varied considerably. Fairbank had envisioned completing the field work in one year (the traffic survey required that long anyway to cover seasonal variations) and spending another year in analysis. Some States did virtually complete all the field work in a year, but more commonly the several phases were spread over a longer period, and in no case was the analysis completed in a year. Even with the stretched-out approach, however, a great deal of manpower was involved. In Ohio, for example, over 600 men were in the field within 2 months after the work got underway, some occupied for a full year and others a shorter time. There probably never was a tabulation of the total number of people employed in the early work, but it seems safe to say that at the height of the field work at least 15,000 men were given employment, almost all from the relief rolls or the ranks of the unemployed. Thus, leaving out the benefits of the planning surveys to highway administration, the work represented a major accomplishment in the constructive expenditure of work relief funds in a period of great distress in the country.
But this sudden acceptance of highway planning had a considerable impact on the Bureau of Public Roads as well, for on it fell the task of aiding the States in launching and supervising the work. The few Bureau people who had worked on the cooperative traffic surveys hardly provided a nucleus from which to start. So the Bureau set up a training program for highway planning supervisors, drawing not only from the Washington staff, but recruiting from the field offices and the forest and park programs as well. The response was good, mostly from the younger and perhaps more imaginative employees, many from graduates of the ongoing Bureau’s junior engineer training program. With word of the training program getting around, States also began sending prospective supervisors to take the training courses. While the number “processed” through the training program was probably never tabulated, what is more important the program marked the creation of a new discipline—highway planning—the scope and importance of which surely could not have been foreseen at that time.
One of the maps prepared as a result of the 1930 western traffic survey.
Thus were launched the highway planning surveys, and simply keeping them on course during their early years was a major concern of the Bureau. Data collection procedures were steadily improved, and the many problems that developed in tabulating, reconciling, and summarizing data were met and solved. But the harder part was in moving from summaries of data to reports and from reports to administrative and policy decisions. It was to this aspect that Fairbank wrote and spoke so frequently in the years before World War II.
Perhaps his most preceptive writing was in the area of taxation, for he foresaw financing as the most critical problem of the future. In the “depression psychology” of the era, in which the official views held that the country had reached its pinnacle of development, that there would be permanent unemployment and our problem would be the equitable distribution of limited resources, neither he nor anyone else could foresee the great upsurge in the economy and even more in highway transportation that in 1956 made relatively easy the financing of the Interstate System—the greatest public works program in history.
Planning the Interstate System
While the States were absorbed in collecting and analyzing highway planning data, and Fairbank particularly saw the need to develop a “climate” in the States that would encourage them to carry on from the easier stage of surveying to the more difficult one of planning, the Bureau of Public Roads almost immediately had need to use the data for planning. Early in 1937 President Roosevelt called Chief MacDonald into his office and handed him a map of the United States on which he (the President) had drawn three lines east and west and three north and south across the country. He reasoned that with the increasing use of the automobile the need for more and better highways for long distance travel would be needed, and suggested that the six routes he had sketched on the map might be built and financed through the collection of tolls. And he asked Chief MacDonald to study the possibility. Again, such a program would not only benefit the motor vehicle user but constitute a desirable public works program to provide employment. It can be said that this map is the lineal ancestor of the Interstate System, truly a document of first importance in highway history.
Returning from the White House, Chief MacDonald handed the map to Mr. Fairbank and asked him to get on with the study. Thus, began the first assembly of detailed information on traffic flow on a national basis, possible only because of the rapid progress by the States on the highway planning surveys. While data were still not available for all States, enough States had progressed far enough to supply the data needed for a reasonable appraisal of the feasibility of the President’s suggestion. As a first step, a traffic flow map of the United States was prepared, finished in January 1938 and later updated to January 1939 and refined as more States could supply data. For the first time a picture of travel on all main routes was available. 
Although the map of the original six routes cannot be found, this map was authenticated in 1951 by Mr. Fairbank as having also been drawn by President Roosevelt and sent to the Bureau in 1938 to indicate the routes on which modern express highways should be built. This map shows three lines east and west and five north and south.
This map showed in striking manner the buildup of traffic near the cities and the relatively low volumes between them. This visual picture was reinforced by results of the origin-destination studies already completed in several States, which showed the small percentage of long trips and how the volumes even on the longer stretched between cities were made up largely of successions of short trips. The small amount of really long distance travel—transcontinental—is shown in the report of the study Toll Roads and Free Roads[3] by a map indicating the origins and destinations of traffic crossing a cordon line running through the States of Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona. Here on all the main routes crossing this line only 300 vehicles in an average day were traveling from the Pacific coast States to the Atlantic seaboard States, indicating that transcontinental travel was almost negligible. Only 20 trips from the west coast reached Florida, a figure interestingly close to a finding of 23 trips that were destined to the west coast from Florida, as shown by a similar cordon on the Florida border. Figures such as these gave early evidence that long distance travel would not be sufficient to justify the financing through tolls of the six suggested routes. But it was surmised that certain sections might be self-liquidating. So the investigation proceeded to ascertain the most desirable location of the six routes from the points of view of attracting travel and feasibility of construction and to estimate their costs and probable toll revenues.
The six routes totaled 14,336 miles in length, divided into 75 sections for estimates of cost and potential revenue. Section lengths ranged from just over 30 miles to one—Spokane, Washington, to Fargo, North Dakota—extending 1,160 miles. Mile-by-mile estimates were made of construction, maintenance, operating and debt service costs, aggregated by sections and matched against estimated toll revenues, assuming that travel by 1960 would be 2.5 times the 1937 figure. The comparison confirmed the early surmise; the revenue for the period 1945 (when the system would be completed) to 1960 equaled less than 40 percent of the cost for the entire system and the report concluded the toll system was not feasible. Yet one section, Jersey City to New Haven, showed revenues equaling 104 percent of the cost and adjoining sections from Washington to Portland, Maine, near enough to the break-even point to indicate feasibility of the entire length. Other feasible sections were found running east from Chicago and in southern California.
While the report’s conclusion was unfavorable to the toll concept, the detailed study led to a finding that a master plan for highways in the United States called for appropriate action by the Federal and State governments for “the construction of a special, tentatively defined system of direct interregional highways, with all necessary connections through and around cities, designed to meet the requirements of the national defense in time of war and the needs of a growing peacetime traffic of longer range.” With the “abundant data” supplied by the States from the planning surveys, the report examined the desirability of a longer system not for toll-paying traffic but for general use, totaling 26,700 miles and serving all principal cities and regions of the country, and found it “. . . now desirable by law to establish this or a closely similar System as the Primary Highway System of the United States.” Much of the justification of this system lay in its service to the cities, and indeed, the report devoted many pages to a suggested plan for highways in an urban area, Fairbank using his home city, Baltimore, as an example. Thus was suggested the two major new directions Federal highway aid would take in the years ahead—the Interstate System and acceptance of responsibility of the Federal Government and the States in the areas of urban transportation.
This drawing of a typical grade separation, access roads, and toll booths for a 4-lane road was included in the toll road study.
This sketch of a proposed express highway and bypass route around Baltimore was a part of the master plan for free highway development in the toll road study.
Aware of the study being made by the direction of the President, the Congress to show its support for the investigation (and perhaps to insure that it would receive the report) included in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938 the following provision:
The Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads is hereby directed to investigate and make a report of his findings and recommend to the Congress not later than February 1, 1939, with respect to the feasibility of building, and cost of, superhighways not exceeding three in number, running in a general direction from the eastern to the western portion of the United States, and not exceeding three in number, running in a general direction from the northern to southern portion of the United States, including the feasibility of a toll system on such roads.
Approved on June 8, 1938, the Congress gave the Bureau only 8 months to complete the investigation and report, thus recognizing it was well on the way to completion at the time. The report was transmitted to the Congress by the President on April 27, 1939.
The 1939 report soon had an impact. In April 1941 President Roosevelt appointed the National Interregional Highway Committee “to investigate the need for a limited system of national highways to improve the facilities now available for interregional transportation, . . . and [later became a study for] the possibility of utilizing some of the manpower and industrial capacity expected to be available at the end of the war.”[4] While there is no documentation to support it, it seems fair to assume that the action by the President stemmed from representations originating within the Bureau of Public Roads.
The Committee first met in June 1941 and immediately laid plans for a major study to be carried out by the staff of the Bureau of Public Roads. The Committee also enlisted the cooperation of the State highway departments. Subsequently Public Law 146, approved July 13, 1943 (an amendment to the Defense Highway Act of 1941) again alined the Legislative Branch with the Executive Branch of the Federal Government by authorizing and directing Commissioner MacDonald to study and report on the needs for interregional highways. While both Toll Roads and Free Roads and Interregional Highways, the title of this second major report, were prepared under the direction of H. S. Fairbank by the staff of the Bureau of Public Roads and with the substantial assistance of the State highway departments, there was a significant difference. Toll Roads and Free Roads was a Bureau of Public Roads product; Interregional Highways was the product of the National Interregional Highway Committee and submitted to President Roosevelt as such. He in turn transmitted the report to the Congress to meet its requirement of Commissioner MacDonald.
The composition of the Committee is particularly important. Invited by the President to serve on the Committee (all of whom accepted) were three men from the highway field—Commissioner MacDonald, G. Donald Kennedy from Michigan who was incoming President of the American Association of State Highway Officials, and Charles H. Purcell, State Highway Engineer from California; two were from the city planning field—Harland Bartholemew, prominent city planner from St. Louis and Rexford Guy Tugwell, Chairman of the New York City Planning Commission; rounding out the Committee were Frederic A. Delano, Chairman of the National Resources Planning Board and a political leader, and Bibb Graves, former Governor of Alabama. The Committee elected Mr. MacDonald as chairman, and he in turn appointed Mr. Fairbank as secretary.
The composition of the Committee clearly shows the importance then attached to the city and its problems in developing a framework for national highway development. The Committee met repeatedly, and while the words of Interregional Highways were distinctly Fairbank’s, the principles expounded were those discussed and agreed upon by the Committee and which received its unanimous approval.
This was indeed a comprehensive study, beginning with the meeting of the Committee in June 1941 and extending until the submittal of the report on January 1, 1944. The system finally recommended was selected by the Committee after examination of several other systems, greater or less in mileage, as best meeting the requirements laid down by the President and the Congress. The report was transmitted to the Congress on January 12, 1944, and the designation of the system, identified as the National System of Interstate Highways, was authorized by the Congress in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of that year. After much study and discussion, the routes of the system as proposed by the several States, substantially as recommended by the Committee, were approved by the Federal Works Administrator in August 1947. But it was not until the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 that work on the system began in earnest.
Without doubt Interregional Highways was and remains the most significant document in the history of highways in the United States. Several characteristics of the report make it particularly significant.
First is the composition of the Committee that produced it. The report was the product of highway officials and planners with broad interests working together.
Second, the system was not selected simply on the basis of its traffic usage. It was recognized from the beginning that the purpose of the system was to provide for highway transportation to serve the economic and social needs of the Nation. Systems were devised to serve the Nation’s agricultural production, its mineral production, its forest products, its manufacturing centers and, of course, its population centers and defense establishments. Without the help of computers, all these factors were laboriously shown by shading county by county on maps, or by similar devices, and the different systems “eyeballed” through the areas of heaviest shading or largest circles. It was not until the final choice of the recommended routes was made by the Committee that traffic volumes to be expected were brought into the picture, and then only to be used as a means to estimate costs and relative economic benefits.
Third, the importance of the system within the cities was given much attention, with a major portion of the report devoted to “Locating the Interregional Routes in Urban Areas.” Here principles of route location, still sound today, were proposed and illustrated. A paragraph from this report of 30 years ago is worth quoting. It reads as follows:
In choosing these locations for the arterial routes, however, it should be recognized that the undeveloped lands which lie so favorably for highway purposes also present opportunities equally favorable for other purposes of city planning. Properly preserved and developed, they can become the needed parks and playgrounds for residents of adjacent populated areas. Alternatively, they can be developed as new residential communities in the modern manner, unhampered by previous commitment to the traditional rectangular street plan. It is highly desirable, therefore, that the location and plan of the new highways in these areas shall be developed in harmonious relation with other appropriate uses of the now vacant land. Wherever possible, plans for all uses of the land should be jointly developed and acquisition for all purposes of public uses should proceed simultaneously.[5]
Fourth, the need for coordination with other modes was emphasized with the words “However, it is at the cities . . . that the closest attention should be paid to the possibilities of common location, and also to such location of the highways as will best and most conveniently serve to promote their use in proper coordination with other transportation means.”[6]
Fifth, the Committee recognized clearly the limitations of the system. To quote again,
Obviously, it is not possible by any limited highway system, whatever the relative importance of its constituent routes, to serve all the needs of the Nation’s traffic. Nor is it reasonable to assume that in and near the cities the routes included in such a limited system will if improved, provide a complete solution to the serious problem of city traffic congestion. . . . In this connection the Committee has been restricted in its choice because the President directed it to select an interregional rather than a local system, and to consider national above local needs. . . . it is important, both locally and nationally, to recognize this recommended system . . . as that system and those routes which best and most directly join region with region and major city with major city.[7]
Sixth, the Committee recognized the need for full cooperation at all levels of government (still to be fully attained, it seems) by the words “. . . the particular locations of those routes [must] be agreed upon in common by Federal, State, and municipal authorities who will share the responsibility for arterial highway improvement, that the desirable standards for that improvement may be established and commonly accepted. . . .”[8]
Finally, the Committee reiterated the recommendation of “Toll Roads and Free Roads” for the creation of a Federal Land Authority, with powers of excess condemnation to aid in recoupment of increases in land values resulting from construction of the system. It also recommended creation of similar authorities in the States, with the thought that a Federal-aid plan might be developed to finance immediate acquisition of land and to permit amortization of the costs by State and local authorities over a long period of time.[9]
It is perhaps of interest that President Roosevelt in transmitting the report to the Congress added in his own words to the transmittal letter prepared in Public Roads the following paragraph:
As a matter of fact, while the courts of the different States have varied in their interpretations, the principle of excess condemnation is coming into wider use both here and in other countries. I always remember the instance of the farmer who was asked to sell a narrow right-of-way through his farm for a main connecting highway. From an engineering point of view it would have been as feasible to build the new highway across the dirt road that ran in front of his house and barn. Actually the owner received from a jury an amount equal to the whole value of the farm. The road was built. The owner of the land thereby acquired two new frontages. He sold lots on one frontage for the former value of his farm. A year or two later he sold the other frontage for the farm value of his farm. The result was that he still had his house and barn and 90 percent of his original acreage, and in addition he had received in cash three times the value of what the whole place was worth in the first instance.[10]
This recitation of what was in fact the early period in urban highway planning is simply to demonstrate that highway officials at that time were ready to join with those in other disciplines who could help in developing the Nation’s needed transportation system, and that the principles then established are still valid. What has been done since has been built on this solid foundation, and is no less a sound structure for continued extension and growth of national, State, and urban transportation from here on.
Planning in Wartime
While, of course, not even suspected at the time, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1940 authorized the last apportionments for the regular Federal-aid highway program to be made until toward the end of World War II. The next Federal-aid act was entitled the Defense Highway Act of 1941, approved on November 19, 1941, less than 3 weeks before Pearl Harbor. While the country was not yet at war, the possibility of United States’ involvement was recognized in the year preceeding to be sufficient, at least in the highway program, to give life to the adage “In time of peace, prepare for war.” The Defense Highway Act in effect placed the road program on a war footing, too little and too late perhaps, but at least a start.
The effect of war preparations, and later the war itself, was felt in two principal ways, first in the need to reconstitute the States’ highway programs to concentrate on road improvements important, and later essential, to the war effort, and second to carry on the restructured program in the face of material shortages, loss of key personnel to the military services, and reduced road user revenues at State level. The Congress responded to these problems to some degree, at least, by authorizing 75 percent instead of 50 percent participation in projects on the strategic network and acceptance of the full cost of providing access to military establishments and essential industrial plants. In the area of critical material shortages, the Bureau of Public Roads developed working relationships with the succession of agencies responsible for allocating critical materials to try to gain for the States the authorizations to draw from the available supplies enough material to meet the need on the most essential projects.
It was a period of great distress, of course, with States seeing their road systems deteriorating under the burden of heavy wartime loads. Materials were allocated on the basis of priorities established by the War Production Board, and it is safe to say that the proof of need in the highway sphere could not have been established without the data available or collected as needed by the statewide highway planning surveys.
Priorities were granted after a project by project review, centralized in Washington, under which each application was examined in detail, and its essentiality rated not only against other highway and transportation needs, but against needs in other areas—housing, manufacturing, farming, and in fact every activity. Precise information on the number of war connected trips over proposed projects, the volumes of goods and war material to be moved, the residences of employees, and many other facts related to the use of the proposed projects had to be assembled, analyzed and funneled to Washington. There the Bureau of Public Roads could begin the torturous process of gaining an allocation of the required steel, rubber, cement, asphalt or other critical material. Suffice it to say that with the highway planning survey data, enough cases could be supported to prevent a breakdown in highway transportation.
As Fairbank once remarked, if in time of peace, prepare for war, then in all logic in time of war one should prepare for peace. And whether it may have been that the long duration of the war could not have been foreseen, preparations for peace indeed began early in the war. The fact that work went steadily forward on preparation of the Interregional Highways report was itself an indication of the long-range view of planning for postwar needs. This effort absorbed a large share of the planning resources of the Bureau of Public Roads not directly involved in the war effort planning.
Another aspect of postwar preparation came in an amendment to the Defense Highway Act, approved on July 13, 1943, that permitted the States to use any funds still remaining from the apportionment under the 1940 Federal-Aid Highway Act not only for the “engineering and economic investigations” authorized in 1934, but also for the preparation of plans, specifications, and estimates (PS&E). The purpose here was to keep the process of collection of essential data going and also to provide a reservoir of “plans on the shelf” to permit immediate start of highway construction once the emergency ended. This latter provision illustrated that the “depression psychology” of the 1930’s was not entirely dispelled from official thinking even by the exigencies of war. The view then held, and reflected even in Interregional Highways, was that the return of the troops after the war and the sudden cessation of war industry would, without advance preparations, produce massive unemployment and perhaps even a depression such as followed World War I. No one could foresee that the pent-up demand for consumer goods, so long missing or in short supply, and the desire for new products on the market as a result of advances in technology associated with war production would take years to satisfy. And this same psychology, parenthetically, probably accounted for the persistent underestimating of traffic growth for several years after the war.
Another area of preparation for peace during war is seen in the growing concern for the problems of urban transportation. The predominantly short range of highway trips and the buildup of traffic in and near the cities disclosed in the studies for Toll Roads and Free Roads were emphasized and further quantified by the early studies of the National Interregional Highway Committee. These findings led Fairbank to repeatedly urge State highway officials and other groups to recognize the urban problems they soon would be facing and to gain the cooperation of city officials in an approach to what he saw as a mutual responsibility. Beyond that he saw the need for gaining an understanding of urban transportation needs and characteristics paralleling what the highway planning surveys were producing for the rural areas. And he called on his staff to devise appropriate study procedures.
Obviously many of the techniques fully satisfactory in rural areas could not be applied in cities. Procedures for counting traffic and determining origins and destinations of trips in rural areas could not simply be transferred to the networks of closely spaced city streets. While traffic volumes on rural roads where traffic had little choice of route were indicative of improvement needs, volumes on city streets, with traffic having almost infinite choices of routes, had little significance. Traffic often followed the improvement program, shifting from one street to another as the relative capacity or riding quality shifted with the construction and maintenance programs. What was needed was information that would reveal the composition of traffic as shown by the portions that were through trips as contrasted with the longer-range trips within the area and the short-range neighborhood trips, and trips not only by motor vehicle but by transit as well. Generally these were all being accommodated on the same streets, and the need was obvious for street systems that would permit separation of trips with their disparate interests and permit the design of the different elements of the system to be compatible with the type of service they would provide. Origins, destinations and purposes of trips were required, and stopping even a small sample of vehicles to interview the drivers, as could easily be done in rural areas, could hardly be practicable on busy city streets. Beyond that, the closely spaced network would permit easy avoidance of an interview station. And interviewing transit passengers presented new and not easy problems.
After exploring a variety of methods, some theoretically and some on the ground, with little prospect for satisfying results, the home-interview method was accepted as a possible approach. George Gallup was having considerable success in his early opinion polls. His method involved interviewing the right number, as determined statistically, of representative members of the different occupational groups comprising the total population, such as doctors, plumbers, teachers, housewives, laborers and even unemployed. This approach offered serious problems in attempting to adapt it on a scale necessary to a transportation survey. Fortunately the Bureau of the Census at that time was exploring means of reducing the costs of its complete censuses by the use of sampling methods. It was its view that by preselected geographic samples, say one house in ten, a representative sample of occupational groups would be obtained. That approach would also provide a geographic spread of interviews for origins and destinations of trips needed in travel studies. So the Bureau of the Census, while exploring for their own purposes and finding in the highway field a companion interest, agreed to assist by joining in assaying the statistical soundness of the samples and to assist in supervising one or two early studies so selected. Thus was born the home-interview approach, the basis of today’s urban transportation planning process. While still in wartime, 1944, the first home-interview studies to ascertain urban travel habits were launched (not without some trepidation to be sure) nearly simultaneously in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Little Rock, Arkansas. Certainly the State and city officials deserve a great deal of credit in agreeing to undertake such a novel program on the basis of assertions of belief by three Washington Office representatives that the approach would work! But work it did, and from there it grew.
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944
All these preparations for peace in time of war, mostly in the planning area, led to the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944. With all the Federal-aid acts since 1916, it is difficult and probably not useful to try to single out one or a few that are the most significant. The 1916 Act, the first, was organic legislation that got it all started. The 1921 Act stands out by introducing the system concept. More recently the 1956 Act, setting up the Highway Trust Fund and authorizing funds to complete the Interstate System, must be one of the most significant. But none can stand out above the 1944 Act as “landmark” legislation.
First, it authorized apportionments for a 3-year period beginning at the termination of the war emergency or at the concurrent resolution of the two houses of Congress, and it authorized a large amount ($1.5 billion).
Second, it authorized funds specifically for expenditure on the “Federal-aid highway system in urban areas,” not for a Federal-aid urban system. (Originally the routes were "extensions" of the rural Federal-aid or Federal-aid secondary routes, and later “portions” of those routes.)
Third, it required the selection of a Federal-aid secondary system for which secondary funds were earmarked. 
The Interstate System is the only completely planned highway system in the United States.
Fourth, it divided the funds as follows: 45 percent for the Federal-aid system (it was not yet designated as the “primary” system, and the 45 percent could be expended on rural or urban portions at the States’ election); 30 percent for the secondary system; and 25 percent for the routes in urban areas. This 45:30:25 ratio was to prevail until 1973.
Fifth, it authorized the designation of the National System of Interstate Highways, following almost exactly the recommendations of the National Interregional Highway Committee. The system was to be “. . . so located as to connect by routes, as direct as practicable, the principal metropolitan areas, cities, and industrial centers, to serve the national defense, and to connect at suitable border points with routes of continental importance in the Dominion of Canada and the Republic of Mexico. . . .” (Although it was later to become an issue, nowhere did the Congress indicate that the system should be expected to accommodate purely local traffic, such as urban commuting movement.)
Sixth, it provided that on any highway or street thereafter constructed with Federal aid “. . . the location, form, and character of informational, regulatory, and warning signs, curb and pavement or other markings, and traffic signals installed or placed by any public authority, or other agency, shall be subject to the approval of the State highway department with the concurrence of the Public Roads Administration. . . .”
Seventh, it added to the authorization of the 1½ percent highway planning funds the words “and for highway research necessary in connection therewith.” It was the view of the Public Roads Administration that research in the structure and geometries of the highway was proceeding well under State financing or with Public Roads administrative funds, but that not enough effort was being applied to research in the areas of economics and administration. Once research in these areas became established, the restriction was lifted by subsequent legislation, but through the late forties and the fifties Commissioner MacDonald stood firm against the use of any 1½ percent funds for the generally more favorably viewed physical research.
Indeed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 stands as landmark legislation; and most of its forward looking provisions stemmed directly from the highway planning efforts so strongly advocated and ably administered by Fairbank and MacDonald. It was a mandate for the future.
Planning in the Postwar Period
Statewide Highway Planning
During the war, highways were officially regarded as expendable, and they were pretty well spent. The most noticeable resulting deficiencies were probably on the State primary systems, and even though Federal-aid funds authorized in the 1944 Act were available, it was soon apparent that funds at both State and Federal levels would not be adequate to stay even with growing needs, to say nothing of recouping the wartime losses. Traffic volumes were greatly depressed by gasoline rationing and the suspension of passenger car production during the war, dropping to about half their 1941 level in 1943 and 1944. It was generally expected that traffic would recover, but slowly, and that time would be on the side of the highway officials in organizing their catch-up programs. But this was not to be. Traffic volumes recovering from their 1943 low point reached the 1941 level again in 1946, not somewhere around 1960 as perhaps wishful thinking had forecast. By 1948 they had reached the prewar trend line, having thus completely recovered in only 5 years, and the volumes continued to push vigorously upward, following almost exactly the equally unexpected surging economic growth.
To try to establish with the State legislatures the need for more funds, many highway officials reasoned that if highway planning facts were convincing to the War Production Board in allocation of critical materials, they might be equally convincing to State legislators as evidence of highway needs in their own States. Some States did use the data to develop programs for bringing the State highway systems back to reasonable service levels, hopeful of receiving legislative approval and necessary funding. But invariably they met disappointment. The programs were thought to be self-serving, that State highway needs were emphasized at the expense of county and local roads; or that they gave insufficient attention to the needs of the cities; or that the needs were overstated; or that the program would require increased tax rates. Out of this confusing and often frustrating situation came the statewide highway needs studies. The first in California, completed in 1946, set the stage for what might be called an era of such studies.
California’s postwar highway problems were perhaps the most severe of any State, stemming largely from the huge population increases during and immediately following the war. Responding to the challenge, the State legislature enacted the Collier-Burns Act, so named for its authors Senator Collier and Assemblyman Burns, the chairmen of the respective highway committees. The Act laid down conditions perceived as needed for a successful survey of highway deficiencies and which became virtually “principles” that were generally adopted by other States as they followed California’s lead.
The first “principle” the Act specified was the establishment of a legislative commission to whom the report was to be made and which could observe the procedures and conduct of the work, thereby assuring consideration of the report by the legislature.
Second, it provided for a survey of all roads and streets, not just the State highway system, so no level of government could feel that its needs were ignored.
Third, it called for the survey to be conducted by engineers from outside the State to avoid any possible inference of favoring one system or one government level over another.
Fourth, it called for a classification and grouping into systems of all roads and streets according to their functions, toward the end of assigning to the appropriate government levels the responsibility for administering and financing the improvement programs on the different systems.
Fifth, it called for estimates of cost and recommendations of programs to bring the entire network up to desirable standards.
In seeking “outside” engineering assistance, California came into agreement with the Automotive Safety Foundation (ASF). This nonprofit foundation, sponsored by the automotive and associated industries, such as oil and rubber, had been organized to work with public and other private agencies toward the improvement of highway safety. Its principal purpose was to serve as a rallying point for activity in the field of highway and traffic safety and, through educational programs, sponsorship of conferences and meetings, and financial support of projects, to mobilize resources for a concerted attack on the accident problem. It had become convinced that improvement in the engineering of the highway, not simply to produce safer designs but to relate the design standards to the function and capacity requirements of the routes, would constitute an important element in its program. In this position the Foundation received the strong endorsement of the Public Roads Administration and with the Foundation’s President, Pyke Johnson, and Commissioner MacDonald lending their strong and steady personal support, technical and financial resources from public and private sectors were deftly marshalled in an attack on specific aspects of the overall problems. Thus, the Automotive Safety Foundation, through its engineering division organized under G. Donald Kennedy, formerly Highway Commissioner of Michigan (the only elected Commissioner among the State highway administrators), undertook to serve as the engineering consultant for the California survey. This first effort led to increasing ASF involvement in highway needs studies over many years to come.
The engineers did not conduct the surveys. Basic data came from the highway planning surveys or, where more data were needed, they were collected by the States, counties or cities as required. The engineers, with the aid of technical committees representing the various levels of government, developed standards against which street and highway adequacy might be judged. Cost estimates were prepared for needed improvements to attain the agreed upon standards, estimates of revenue were made, and from the mass of data, construction programs were prepared. Usually alternatives were proposed to show the governmental units responsible for the various systems what would be required to “catch up” with needs in periods of 10, 15 or 20 years, so the State legislature and other governing bodies could choose how rapidly they might or could bring their roads and streets to adequacy. Through the whole process, the legislative commission could observe the work as it progressed, and, thus, both political and technical leaders had had a part in the preparation of the report.
Here perhaps a word on the meaning of “highway needs” is in order. The phrase has become a part of our vocabulary, as shown by legislation at both Federal and State levels. The term is unfortunate perhaps in that it may lead to criticism that what has been proposed is not to satisfy “needs” but “desires,” and the forecast of “needs” is a self-fulfilling forecast in that if a highway is built it will be used, and thus the “need” demonstrated. Actually in the highway needs studies, two sets of standards were generally used, one called "tolerable" and the other “desirable.” The needs study might accept as not needing improvement sections that were barely adequate for current traffic or meeting “tolerable” standards. But when any section was found to be below that level and was recommended for construction, the design was based on what would be required to meet traffic volumes of 20 years beyond the expected date of construction, with all desirable safety and environmental factors included—the “desirable” standard.
What really is done is to establish a “level of service” that would in effect be a measure of the quality of traffic flow—speed, comfort and safety all included. The higher the design standard, the higher the level or quality of service, but also the higher the cost. Thus, the criterion becomes the degree to which the desirable level of service can be attained, limited generally by finances but sometimes, as in urban areas, by physical or environmental factors as well. The level of service to be used as a goal can and, in fact, generally must be the subject of some trade-offs between desirable and tolerable service. That is the way in which “need” should be interpreted in the needs studies. It is the amount of mobility and safety that the public is willing to buy, given the potential traffic volumes, and the costs in money, environmental impact, and nonuser social and economic factors involved. Once the technical and administrative or political leaders concerned have agreed upon the level of service that is appropriate for the routes or systems to be studied under the particular conditions involved, the cost estimate is simply the cost to achieve it. Question as to whether it is to satisfy a “need” or a “desire” disappears, for the target generally lies somewhere in between.
Through the next decade, from the publication of the report for California in 1946 up to the launching of the Interstate program by the 1956 Act, the Foundation assisted 19 States in conducting their needs studies, not all as complete as in California but all using the same format with respect to the request by the State legislature for the study and the committee structure involving both technical and political leaders. Of course in all, dependence for facts fell on the highway planning surveys.
Despite the visible success in the early studies, interest was slow in building up in many States, and the pressures to overcome the immediate problems of the warworn highways were enough to give many States reasons for not worrying about long-range plans or programs. Attention even to keeping the planning data up to date lagged. In this atmosphere Fairbank pressed even harder to bring to the States the importance of planning ahead. In one speech, for example, he closed with these words:
It is a remarkable fact that motor vehicle manufacturers, by a concerted action to improve, and more exactly define the designed capacity of, their vehicles, and through the recent invaluable assistance of the Automotive Safety Foundation, of which they are the principal support, should be taking, as they are, a leading part in bringing about the needed multilateral cooperation toward many of the objectives of highway transportation planning as here defined.
Such cooperation and broad planning is being achieved State by State, one after another. The results that have issued from it in California, the even more gratifying results soon to appear in Michigan are certain to inspire similar effort in many States.
The Public Roads Administration is willing and anxious to take its part. It was for this use, exactly, that the highway planning surveys were conceived; to these ends every item of the recommended outline of needed fact gathering was directed. A recent General Administrative Memorandum (No. 319, issued September 24, 1947) renews our promise of cooperation, and repeats an earlier suggestion of the manner in which information, that can be well assembled only by the highway planning surveys, can be addressed to the ends of highway transportation planning.
The State highway departments cannot, if they would, avoid the responsibility of major contribution to such planning effort when it is undertaken, as surely, soon or late it will be, in every State. The State highway planning surveys will be the expected source of most of the facts required in that planning.
May I, in closing, suggest to the head of each State highway department here attending, that he take a fresh look at his highway planning survey after the approaching holidays ; that, patiently, for it will require patience, he read the full text of General Administrative Memorandum No. 319 ; and, facing toward the west from whence a new wind is blowing, decide for himself, whether he is going to be ready, as the inevitable occasion will require, to fulfill the requirements of this thing called highway transportation planning.[11]
With the steady pressure of surging traffic growth, the continued urging from Washington, and the success of the early needs studies carried on with the aid of the Automotive Safety Foundation, 35 States had followed California’s lead by 1959 in preparing for their future. Not all studies covered all aspects of the problem, other consultants entered the field, and in some States repeat studies were carried out to measure the effectiveness of programs adopted as a result of the original studies or to up date the earlier recommendations in light of unanticipated changes of conditions, notably the rate of traffic growth. With the attention given to the highway needs studies, the use of statewide highway planning data had come into its own in the decade after the war and established highway planning as an essential function of the highway departments.
Urban Transportation Planning
The postwar decade saw wide expansion of the urban transportation planning process that, as noted earlier, emerged in Tulsa and Little Rock in 1944. The methods were unique, untried, and the cost of data collection high. The figure of 10 cents per capita originally estimated proved to be far too low, but even so it represented amounts well beyond any figures that had been thought of as the cost of an urban traffic survey.
Even as the data collection process was new, so too were new analytical procedures required. The origins and destinations of trips for a representative day were recorded in the sample households and expanded on the basis of the sample size to represent the total travel for the entire area. Recognizing that the particular route of travel was determined by the layout of the street network and the capacity and condition of the streets, no attempt was made to trace the actual routes, but rather to show on a map the direct line between origin and destination. With the sample households grouped into zones of similar characteristics, or sometimes simply geographically delimited, all trips between each zone and each other zone were shown by bands of varying widths. These bands came to be known as “desire lines,” showing the desired paths of all trips, either by private vehicle or transit in the area. The heaviest bands then gave indication of the desirable location of arterial routes (whether or not feasible) and the traffic volumes the trips would produce. As a check on the accuracy of the survey, the number of trips crossing a natural screen line, such as a river, as shown by the desire lines could be compared with actual vehicle counts. Generally a high accuracy was found, often over 90 percent agreement, but where the sample produced too few trips (seldom did the interviews produce too many) the screen line counts provided a basis for adjustment.
This map shows the major “desire lines” that resulted from a transportation study made in Baltimore in 1938.
It is important to recall what was recognized then—that the process was a survey. It did not produce a plan nor even the future volumes for design purposes. The only way to estimate future travel was to assume that if the planners expected the population to increase by say 50 percent, then 50 percent should be added to all current origins and destinations. It was known that that wasn’t right, for certainly population or industry would grow more in some zones than in others, but it was better than not increasing them at all, which some planners were then urging. It became apparent early in the game that a relationship existed between the use of the land and the travel it produced or attracted — and that it could be measured. But means to use this relationship in developing plans for the future were rudimentary at best. The earliest effort to apply this approach was probably in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the travel to and from the existing airport was transferred to the expected location of a new airport in developing a freeway plan.
It remained for the development of the computer to permit exploitation of the land use-transportation relationship, given its first major test in Detroit. This new computer technology marked the turning from surveying to planning. But the application of the new technology could not have occurred without the resources of the highway department’s 1½ percent HPE funds being made available. And it could not have been implemented without conversion of the land use inventories and projections, then usually shown on maps by zones of different colors, from a qualitative to a quantitative basis. It was necessary to know the trip producing characteristics of each type of land use. It was important to know not that a zone was industrial, but what kind of industry was there, for a shoe factory would produce far different numbers of trips than a steel mill, for example. And in residential zones income levels were important because they were a factor in numbers of trips and choice of modes. This in turn induced the highway departments and interested cooperating cities to bring into the planning process, up until then carried on largely by engineers, professionals from other disciplines—such as planning, geography, mathematics, and sociology—better equipped by training to deal with the factors of urban growth, to which transportation facilities must be related.
This tremendous breakthrough in planning, a development which put land use and general planning as well as transportation planning on a quantitative basis, can be attributed to three factors, each essential—the introduction of the computer, the availability of resources never before within reach of planners, and the bringing into the planning process, in many cases with responsibility for the direction of the work, of professionals from other than the engineering discipline. But these factors themselves would not have produced the result had it not been for strong urging of the Public Roads Administration and the technical advances developed by its staff and the willingness of many of the State highway departments and interested cities to participate in this major pioneering effort. And it also required a liberal interpretation of what is a highway purpose, for the use of highway funds both at Federal and State level are restricted by law to expenditures for highway purposes. Highway officials had one ally, however, and a strong one, in the Bureau of the Budget, which informally urged leaning as far as possible in the financing of land use and general planning. The logic, of course, is that one can hardly produce a transportation plan without a land use plan reflecting the form of city or region the local citizens will probably have if not necessarily what they desire, and it was on this basis that highway officials, sometimes with justifiable concern as to its legality, agreed to finance considerably more than what might be narrowly construed as highway planning. In plain fact, land use from the beginning of the modern planning process, has been accepted as the base from which urban transportation planning must start. And perhaps more recently but no less strongly accepted is the fact that transportation can be an important factor in determining land use. The two are interrelated.
In the matter of financing of the land use portion of the process, tribute must be paid to the Housing, and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) and its officials which, as the “701” planning assistance funds became available, joined in the effort as full partners at the Federal level. The cordial and effective cooperation of the staffs of HHFA and the Public Roads Administration and the direction of much of the 701 money to the cooperative (sometimes called hyphenated) land use-transportation planning process must rank well up with the highway contribution in the success of the process.
While highway departments were placing major emphasis on planning arterial routes in urban areas, city street congestion was steadily worsening. Arterial highway improvements even though planned were not appearing because of lack of funds, and it became increasingly obvious that even when built they would still leave heavy congestion on city streets, particularly in the downtown areas. The fact that the highway departments’ efforts seemed to be resulting in plans but not programs was leading to expressions of quite divergent philosophies. Many city officials, particularly traffic engineers and public works directors, began urging de-emphasis on freeways and concentration on traffic engineering type of improvements and minor construction programs as an immediate aid to lessening congestion. Highway officials, at least in some cases, held the view that such localized improvements were stopgap at best, and that urban officials should give greater attention to getting on with what the highway officials saw as the essential long-range improvements. It was in this atmosphere that the National Committee on Urban Transportation (NCUT) was created in 1954, initiated and sponsored by the Automotive Safety Foundation. Its purpose was “to help cities do a better job of transportation planning through systematic collection and analysis of basic facts . . . [to] afford the public the best possible transportation service at the least possible cost . . . and . . . aid in accomplishing desirable goals of urban renewal and sound suburban growth.”[12]
The list of organizations which formally named representatives to constitute the National Committee is impressive in its inclusion of virtually every association concerned with transportation in the urban area. The list is as follows:
- The American Municipal Association
- The American Public Works Association
- The International City Managers’ Association
- The National Institute of Municipal Law Officers
- The American Society of Planning Officials
- The Municipal Finance Officers Association
- The Canadian Federation of Mayors and Municipalities
- The National Association of County Officials
- The Bureau of Public Roads
Among the consultants to the Committee were Ralph Bartelsmeyer, then Chief Highway Engineer of Illinois, who represented the American Association of State Highway Officials, and George Anderson, Vice President of the American Transit Association. Ben West, Mayor of Nashville was the first chairman of the Committee, later succeeded by Glenn Richards, Commissioner of Public Works of Detroit.
The assembly of this Committee not only exemplified the ability of the Foundation to marshall resources to bear on a specific problem, but also marked the beginning of the cooperative approach to urban transportation problems.
The Committee enlisted a great many experts in various areas of urban transportation to prepare a series of technical manuals covering all phases of data collection and processing, as well as recommendations for developing the plan, carrying out the plan and improving transportation administration. A count of the members of the subcommittees and their consultants and advisors adds up to 142, all recognized experts or leaders in their respective fields. It was an unparalleled volunteer effort, from 1954 through to the publication of the book Better Transportation for Tour City by the Public Administration Service in 1958. This guide and the 17 procedural manuals became “best sellers,” for the Public Administration Service and went through several printings. The guide and manuals formed the basis for Action Program of Urban Transportation Planning which is discussed later.
It was during the preparation of the NCUT guide and manuals that the divergent philosophies of urban transportation improvement began to merge. In the Committee’s early deliberations, strong representations were made that the planning effort by the States, then often termed the “Bureau Method,” was too expensive and produced no data for localized traffic engineering improvement. There was considerable sentiment that the Committee take a firm stand in recommending diversion of effort from the long-range to the short-range studies and planning. Finally it was recognized that it would be most unwise to look on the two approaches as competitive and that the city interests should join with the States in total studies, long and short range. This decision solidified the Committee’s attack on the problem, and the product of its work soon brought the Public Roads Administration into the activity as a financial sponsor along with the Automotive Safety Foundation. And upon its completion, the program proposed by the Committee was endorsed by the Bureau of Public Roads, and by the Joint Committee on Highways that had by then been named by the American Municipal Association and the American Association of State Highway Officials. The Bureau also found that “In general, the studies embraced in the program, if included in the statewide highway planning survey of any state . . . are eligible for financing assistance from federal-aid highway funds apportioned to the states. . . .”[13]
Thus, this volunteer effort not only produced technical documents of lasting importance, but sparked a significant gain in Federal-State-local relationships and opened a channel for Federal aid to cities in solving their local transportation problems. And, incidentally, the Committee having completed its work in 1958, voluntarily disbanded, not a common-place occurrence in Washington.
Planning in the Washington Office
The increasing activity in the area of highway needs studies and the urban travel habit surveys placed a considerable burden on the Washington Office of the Bureau of Public Roads. Although a Federal planning engineer was located in each State and in each field region, their responsibilities were primarily administrative. Most of the technical assistance and reviews of the ongoing planning activities in the States came from Washington, especially where innovative methods and pilot projects preceded the more general adoption of new procedures or investigation of new areas. Even so, much effort went into advancing the art of planning, or as later more explicitly defined to satisfy the accounting office, research in the planning method.
The highway needs study procedures offers one example. The accepted procedure in the State studies was to estimate the deficiencies in the highway system route by route as they existed at the time of the survey and as they were expected to appear as traffic continued to grow and roads continued to wear out or become inadequate in capacity. Then the year by year requirements to overcome these deficiencies were accumulated to show the total need by systems or for the entire State.
Even before the highway planning surveys were organized, work was being done under agreement between the Bureau of Public Roads and the Iowa State University on what were called road life studies. This study accepted that just as the average life of human beings, or public utility installations, or railroad ties could be forecast by actuarial methods, so too could the life of road surfaces. Plotting the curve of the actual lives of road surfaces from the time of placement until they were retired from service by reconstruction or for other reasons, including different surface types, would give characteristic curves based on actual experience. In many States bond issue financing provided funds for a large mileage of road to be built in a very short period, all or most of which would have to be rebuilt or otherwise taken from service at some future time. Provision must be made for this replacement cost, and by matching the curve of retirements after, say, 10 years since construction with a curve that had been developed by experience of similar surfaces over, say, a 30-year period, the replacement needs, year by year, could be forecast. This forecast did not reveal which particular sections would be retired, but it would give a reasonable estimate of the total replacement program to be anticipated in any year for financial planning. The success of this approach led to its adoption as a part of the highway planning survey package in all States. Replacement of a road surface on the same location did not retire the whole value of the original investment, however. The right-of-way and probably much of the grading and drainage, still were usable, perhaps depreciated but still an asset. So it was reasoned that a curve of investment life, similar to the road surface’s structural life, could also be viewed on an actuarial basis. While there was, then at least, no statistical relationship between investment in the system and demands upon it as shown by traffic volumes accommodated, it was further reasoned that the depreciated investments in the highway plant should keep pace with traffic growth. This view was fully supported by the facts in the decade of the thirties when the curve of traffic growth and the curve of the value of the depreciated investment did almost exactly coincide. Indeed, it has been reasoned and may well be true that our highway systems in that period came nearer to meeting the demands of the traffic of its time than at any period before or since, for it was in this decade that public works programs were strongly financed as unemployment relief projects to the great benefit of the highway systems. With highway construction virtually stopped during the war, investment had barely recovered to its 1940 level by 1950, while traffic had grown by 50 percent. These curves showed at a glance, by their vertical separation, how far the investment fell below the need—50 percent. And by their horizontal separation, they showed how far behind traffic the investment lagged in years—9 years, at the projected rate, to catch up even to 1950 needs, to say nothing about recovering lost ground. When this approach was tested in a number of States in which the needed investment by years to achieve the accepted level of service had been calculated by accumulating the route-by-route needs, the agreement in the total figures was indeed remarkable. The investment life approach could not replace the detailed survey, for it could not be directed toward particular routes or sections necessary to program construction expenditures. But it gave a check on the detailed engineering method and also provided a simple, easily understood means of keeping abreast of progress year by year as the highway program proceeded.
In somewhat the reverse of the highway needs situation, traffic volume forecasting was usually approached on an areawide basis. The classic procedure was to estimate population, motor vehicle ownership per capita, and annual miles per vehicle over the years and from these estimates calculate the total vehicle miles of travel to be expected. In the “depression psychology” still persisting, estimates in all three elements generally were too pessimistic, with the multiplication of all three producing far too low estimates of traffic on which to base future highway needs calculations. In one case of a highway needs study, the level estimated for 10 years ahead had been reached before the report was printed. In exploring this situation to try to find a more realistic basis for forecasting, it was discovered that, for the decade of the thirties, traffic had been growing at almost the same rate as the national economy and that, once the aberrations of the war were behind us, parallel growth was resumed. On the strength of that finding, in 1950 it was suggested by E. H. Holmes, Chief of the Highway Transport Branch of BPR, that this relationship was entirely logical and that in planning ahead it would be unwise to anticipate a growth rate below that of the last two decades—4 percent per year compounded. (This rate of growth would see traffic double in 17½ years; it did double in 16½.) This forecast was greeted with skepticism, to put it mildly, perhaps not because of doubts as to the relationship, but more by doubts that that rate of economic growth could continue. It was not until 1954 that the Bureau of Public Roads formally accepted the soundness of this relationship and raised its sights accordingly. Actually over the past two decades, the gross national product has been growing at about 3 percent annually while traffic has continued its 4 percent rate, presumably as our economy shifts from an industrial to a service oriented society and with a generally higher economic level.
But even the more realistic approach to traffic growth forecasting on an areawide basis was of little help in estimating probable volumes on specific routes. With the aid of selected States, origin and destination studies were carried on before and after major route improvements were made, and studies were made comparing parallel routes, such as toll roads and parallel existing routes. These studies disclosed that the traffic on the new routes could be segregated into four groups: trips “diverted” from other routes by the higher level of service; trips “generated” simply because the new routes offered a convenience not previously available; “development” trips resulting from new development along the routes; and finally, some trips simply resulting from “general traffic growth.” While subsequent research has refined this approach, estimates using these four general divisions of composition of the traffic stream were generally the basis on which the States estimated needs, route by route, required for the important studies to be conducted in 1954 and 1955.
These were examples of developing and improving planning techniques through research. During this period, great advances were made in processing, analyzing and interpreting data collected in the urban travel habit studies. As noted earlier, with the data processing equipment then available, the survey method was validated in the early studies. Travel could be accurately reproduced through home interviews. But to project travel into the future, the relationships between travel and land use had to be established, and as also noted, it took the computer and the introduction of new disciplines into the process to do it.
What emerged from this effort were a series of relationships, called models in computer terminology, that first showed the trips that might be expected from a zone of known land use to other zones of known land uses, as determined from the actual travel in the area. Then with the number of trips from each zone to each other zone calculated, another series of models to permit the “assigning” of the trips to the links of an existing or proposed network of routes, either highway or transit, was developed. The first series of models employed economic and social factors available by zones from census records, such as occupation, income level, and number in the family and their ages. The second included physical factors such as the purpose, time and distance of trips by various routings, costs of parking if that were involved, cost of travel by transit, and other factors to predict the mode and probable route of travel. The intensive work in this area led to a computer program “package” of models that permitted the estimation of trips and their routing with satisfying (to some, surprising) accuracy. In application of these models to estimate future travel and transportation facility needs, future land use had to be estimated. Research showed that computer simulation could also be used to predict the probable use of land, basing the models largely on theory and testing them against actual changes in land use as the urban areas expanded. In that success it may be said that the quantitative approach had been brought to urban planning by the transportation planners. The use of these models, in combination, can show what transportation facilities are required to provide a desired level of service for a given land use; they will also show what density of land use may be allowed if a desired level of transportation service on a given transportation network is to be maintained. These models, refined as they have been over the years, can appraise the effect of land use on transportation, as well as the reverse, the effect of transportation on land use. They can show how to achieve balance between transportation and other development. Edward H. “Ted” Holmes
In 1906, Ted Holmes was born in Kingston, Massachusetts, close by to Plymouth. By the time he was 10, the Federal-Aid Road Act of 1916 had become the first national Federal-aid program. Holmes knew nothing of it at the time, nor did he realize that he later would join the Bureau of Public Roads in what would become an intimate partnership lasting 40 years. The value of that merger is still reflected in the quality of highway programs both in the United States and abroad.
Holmes graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1928. Having spent a summer as a student engineer making time studies for the Bureau of Public Roads, he returned to the Bureau after graduation as a trainee, the launching pad for most BPR engineers. Holmes once remarked that at this point he probably envisioned his future as that of a highway contractor or superintendent.
That vision changed, however, when he was chosen in 1929 for a fellowship in the new field of traffic engineering at Harvard University, from which he graduated with a master’s degree in 1930. From that time on, Ted Holmes was to devote his entire career to highway research and planning.
From his earliest endeavors, he pioneered in the development of workable solutions for both short- and long-range demands. His early efforts in the Bureau of Public Roads included the planning, adaptation, and design of equipment and scientific techniques to measure the traffic characteristics essential to sound traffic planning, design and engineering. The now common practice of counting traffic with pneumatic detectors was just one of the revolutionary steps that stemmed from these studies. In the mid-1930’s he had a major role in establishing the Federal-aid statewide highway planning surveys which provided an appropriate foundation for the continuing Federal and State highway programs.
Among his goals were the pursuit, development and encouragement of a supporting staff. Individually and collectively, those men were or became outstanding experts in their fields. This was due in principal measure to Holmes’ ability to forge effective teams from talented individuals and to give each one an opportunity to reach his potential.
Holmes’ direction and counsel were invaluable throughout the many years when highway research and planning served as the keystone of the Nation’s highway transportation programs. Through the 1940’s and 1950’s, he guided the development of the urban factual surveys and analyses of traffic and urban development. These later evolved into a scientific linking of transportation to land use which is now known internationally as the “3 C” (comprehensive, continuing, cooperative) State-local planning process. This innovation in urban transportation planning, perhaps the most notable of all Ted Holmes’ many contributions, was subsequently extended to statewide planning. The key to the success of that endeavor was the development of a high degree of cooperation among Federal, State, and local officials that perhaps reached its high point with the Williamsburg Conference in 1965, which he chaired.
Holmes’ efforts covered many diverse subjects related to transport. Among these was his discovery of a significant parallel between trends in vehicle mileage (VMT) and the Gross National Product. In a speech in 1950, he advised his audience that they should expect an increase in traffic over the next 15 years of at least 4 percent annually. Although at the time this forecast met with almost universal doubt, in 1965 the average rate had been 4.1 percent. Not all forecasters have been that fortunate! Many of the great landmark reports to Congress bore his mark, among them the Interregional Highways report of 1944 and a series of national needs studies. They formed the framework for the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and the balance of the Federal-aid system and, as such, are basic to the knowledge of the history of national highway development in the United States.
Thomas H. MacDonald, long the Commissioner of Public Roads, commented before his retirement in 1953: “At no time in the last 25 years has there been a report from Research which did not have the stamp of genius in it.” As understudy to H. S. Fairbank, Deputy Commissioner of Research, Holmes’ thoughts permeated all research activities. For example, for years he guided the applied research and development of new planning policy procedures. These were implemented in the Federal-aid highway program, which provided continual stimulation for the physical, economic, and resource development of the Nation.
In 1956 Holmes became Director of Research for the Bureau of Public Roads. As such he fostered the development of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program within the Highway Research Board. He also deserves credit for many activities between various levels of government affecting the Nation’s highway transport program. Examples include his leadership in determining appropriate sizes and weights of commercial vehicles and a rational allocation of highway costs between users and nonusers.
When Research and Planning were divided into separate offices in 1962, Ted Holmes decided to go with Planning as its Director because, as he later remarked, he saw there “the greater opportunity for improving our transportation and our society.” In 1967 he assumed the responsibility of Director of Policy Planning for the Federal Highway Administration in the new Department of Transportation and, with the reorganization of the FHWA, became Associate Administrator for Planning.
Perhaps a fitting description of Ted Holmes is that of an “imagineer”—one who is able to link creative talent, engineering judgment, and administrative finesse. His has always been an inquiring mind, restless, seeking solutions soundly anchored in analysis of relevant facts, yet always cognizant and respectful of opinions differing from his own. To his associates, he always pressed one significant point—“How well we carry on our work will be judged not by this generation, but by those future generations to follow.”
His writings lace the literature of traffic engineering, highway and transportation research, and planning. His “Man in California, 1980’s” paper, as so many others, reflects the range and brilliance of his thought. Following his retirement from Federal service in 1971, he undertook a study of urban transportation planning for the International Road Federation. His 1974 report, The Coordination of Urban Development and the Planning and Development of Transportation Facilities, is a basic source document on urban transportation and development planning practices in selected major countries around the world.
Holmes’ accomplishments have been recognized in many quarters. Some of the principal honors he has earned include the Department of Commerce Meritorious Service Award, presented in 1950, and the Department’s gold medal for Exceptional Service in 1962. He was presented the Roy W. Crum Award for distinguished service by the Highway Research Board in 1958. He received, in 1968, the Thomas H. MacDonald Award “For Outstanding Service in Highway Engineering,” from the American Association of State Highway Officials, and in 1970, the Theodore M. Matson Award for Outstanding Contributions to Traffic Engineering. At the close of his official service to the Department of Transportation in 1971, Secretary John A. Volpe presented Mr. Holmes with the Department’s Silver Medal for Meritorious Achievement in a retirement ceremony attended by several hundred of his friends and colleagues from government and many private organizations in the Washington area. Mr. Holmes has also received acclaim from abroad. In 1965 he was honored with an invitation to deliver the Sixth Reese Jeffreys Triennial Lecture, Looking 25 Years Ahead in Highway Development in the United States, to the Town Planning Institute, London, England. He was also invited to be the principal speaker at the Australian Road Research Board Conference in 1972 and at the South African Institution of Civil Engineers in 1973.
Ted Holmes is home again in Kingston, Massachusetts, hard by Plymouth. He lives there with his wife of 40 years, the former Elizabeth Boynton of San Francisco. The Holmeses have two sons, Joseph and David, who still reside in the Washington, D.C. area.
Greatly respected and honored in all his fields and activities, Ted Holmes is a highly knowledgeable, yet modest, man with almost limitless energy, practical sense, good humor, and rare analytical talent. He has also been a leader with exceptional foresight and a unique capability for understanding people and for organization and management. As Senator Jennings Randolph stated in the Congressional Record, “He performed a major role in improving the lot of his fellow men by helping to provide the highway facilities a mobile society demands. He has left an indelible mark on the Nation’s highway program.”
When a segment of I-35 was built through this residential section of Minneapolis, Minn., the continuity of the community was preserved by providing bridge structures for pedestrians and local streets over I-35.
Reports to Congress
Since 1938, responding to the direction of the Congress for reports on various aspects of the highway problem was sufficiently demanding almost to be called a regular activity in itself. While not all reports were prepared by the planning staff, planning data, available or collected as necessary, were involved in all.
In response to Section 2 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1948, the Commissioner was directed to report on the “current conditions and deficiencies” of the Interstate System that had been finally designated only on August 2 of the previous year. The report Highway Needs of the National Defense[14] showed graphically the use made of the highway system during the war, still fresh in memory. It covered military traffic on the highways, and even a safe emergency landing of an airplane on the highway. It gave examples of heavy traffic service for employees of industrial plants. One plant was opened on a road on which the average traffic of 700 vehicles was swelled to 14,000 when the plant reached full production. It described many examples of accidents resulting from inadequate highways and unsafe bridges.
But especially, it documented not only the great increase in truck movement, but the greatly increased loads on the average truck. Motor truck vehicle mileage more than doubled during the war years, and the axle loads exceeding 18,000 pounds increased from 12 per thousand trucks prewar to nearly 70 per thousand trucks in 1945. With this twelvefold increase in heavy axle loads, it is small wonder that the highways emerged from the war badly battered. What was made abundantly clear was that under the circumstances of World War II, the use of the highways for military vehicles was very little indeed compared to highway use for moving employees to and from warplants and military establishments and for the movement of goods and manufactured products for the war effort. That in fact the highway became literally a part of the assembly line is most strikingly illustrated by the movement by truck of airplane fuselages from Michigan to Texas for final assembly. The actual experiences of war demonstrated the sound judgment of military and highway officials, when recommending the routes of the Interstate System in 1941, that the greatest value of the system to the military would lie in its part in keeping war industry at maximum production levels.
This damaged WW II transport plane, having made an emergency landing on the highway, was towed to the nearest airport. The wings were removed for safe transport along the route.
War production could be undertaken anywhere. This PT boat was on its way to sea from an inland “shipyard.”
Trucks became a necessary part of the WW II production line.
The Interstate System was examined mile by mile for the first time since its designation to measure its deficiencies. Inadequate widths, excessive grades and curvatures, short sight distances and especially weak or narrow bridges and narrow tunnels were recorded, and estimates made to bring all deficient sections, using the standards recommended for the Interstate System in Interregional Highways, up to adequacy for 1948 traffic.
Just why the study estimated the cost to meet the requirements of 1948 traffic while recognizing the continuing increase in traffic volumes and truck weights is not stated, but perhaps because the Congress gave no specific year in the future to which to direct the estimate. In any event, the estimate totaled $11.2 billion, about half to correct deficiencies in rural areas and half in cities of population above 5,000. In estimating the cost at 1948 price levels, it was noted that prices might well decline in the years ahead, again reflecting the still persisting “depression psychology.” The report further recommended that the system be brought to adequacy in no more than 20 years, which indicated an annual program of not less than $500 million. And then in 1968 it would be adequate only for 1948 traffic. But this proposed program, seemingly a “too little-too late” endeavor, must be viewed in light of the fact that at that time improvements by the States on the Interstate System were totaling only about $75 million annually, and the report recommended nearly a sevenfold program increase. It further recommended that a much more rapid improvement program would be reflected in economic and social benefits as well as meeting defense needs more quickly and proposed consideration of advancing the rate of construction by a bond issue. And it definitely proposed that the Federal participation in projects on the Interstate System should be raised above the 50 percent State-Federal matching figure. Other recommendations proposed a revolving fund for emergency construction not only for military emergencies, but for civil disasters as well, and authorization to acquire and stockpile critical materials.
While the authorizations for regular Federal aid were increasing somewhat in each biennial act (the Congress had by then indicated an informal linkage between authorization level and the revenue from the Federal motor-fuel tax), no specific provision was made by the Congress for accelerating work on the Interstate System until $25 million was authorized for each year 1952 and 1953. In the 1954 Act a somewhat more liberal provision was made by authorizing $175 million for that year and 1955. It apportioned the funds somewhat differently, half on the basis of primary system apportionments and the other half on the basis of State population. In addition it changed the matching ratio to 60 percent Federal, 40 percent State. So if Commissioner MacDonald’s recommendation of $500 million annual authorization, made in 1949, now seems low, it took the Congress 5 years to come up to one-third of that level.
There were probably two reasons, at least, for the apparent reluctance of Congress to press ahead on improving the Interstate System. First the States, with limited funds (the highway needs studies had yet to yield much fruit) and with deficiencies on all roads, were reluctant to apply funds to the Interstate System on which the design standards were much higher than on other roads and where much less mileage per dollar could be produced. In fact, many States were strongly opposed to the “high” standards. The other reason was the general pressure for more attention to secondary and farm-to-market roads, with the rural strength in State legislatures and in the Congress always evident.
The second reason is given visibility by a letter of May 27, 1949, from the Committee on Public Works of the Senate to Commissioner MacDonald, asking for a report on the condition of rural local roads. This report The Local Rural Road Problem was submitted to Congress in January 1950 and offered little support for the advocates of more aid for local roads.
Calling on the road inventory and traffic volume and classification data from the highway planning surveys, detailed studies were made of rural road service in all States. Such items as the extent of road surfacing; the distances of rural residents from all-weather roads; the road usage (from the road use studies) of rural roads by farmers and other rural residents; the average traffic volumes; the adequacy of schoolbus and mail delivery routes; the motor vehicle ownership; and the social functions permitted by the road system were studied.
With the aid of State and county engineers, estimates were made of the cost to bring the entire network up to acceptable standards. And finally the question of highway finance and administration were studied.
In capsule summary, it was found that funds allocated to local rural roads in 1947 amounted to $834,976,000—4 percent from Federal sources, 56 percent from State sources and 40 percent from local sources. Local support had dropped steadily to that level from 81 percent in 1927, with reason to believe the trend toward increasing support from the higher government levels would continue. Against this amount of available funds was an estimate of annual construction, maintenance and administrative costs of $894 million to reach adequacy for the entire network in 20 years. The gap between revenue and program costs in 1947 was only $60 million with evidence that the revenue was steadily increasing. In the same year that $835 million was being applied to local roads, the amount applied to all State primary and secondary roads was only about $1.4 billion.
The report concluded local rural roads were not only in good shape relative to roads in the other system, they were in good shape in absolute terms in that funds in sight were sufficient to put the whole system in acceptable condition. The report also concluded that local road administration was generally inefficient because the many small units were unable to own and operate suitable equipment or to retain competent engineering staffs, and it recommended consolidation of local units and close cooperation between State, county and local officials in carrying on the county and local road programs.
If the Congress and the State legislatures were apathetic with respect to improving the Interstate System, the automobile driving public was not. If better roads were not to be provided through the usual procedures, other means were sought, and the means proved to be the second toll era in the United States. The Pennsylvania Turnpike, opened just before the war, proved to be a great boom to military convoy and general truck movement during the war period, if less beneficial to the bond holders. After the war when the upsurge of traffic brought in more than ample revenue, pressures for toll roads appeared in other States. The Pennsylvania Turnpike’s success was accepted with some reservation because of the peculiarly favorable contrast with the existing routes, for the Turnpike tunneled through several ridges that the old road had to climb, utilizing the tunnels of a railroad line never actually completed. But the New Jersey Turnpike, opened in its full length in 1952 with no advantages of terrain, proved to be a bonanza and thereafter the toll road movement swept through State after State.
The toll road movement not only produced roads; it sparked an interest in Congress that had not been ignited by the reports of 1944 or 1948. In the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1954, under section 13 the “Secretary of Commerce [was] authorized and directed to make . . . a study of the costs of completing the several systems of highways in the several States and of the progress and feasibility of toll roads with particular attention to the possible effects of such toll roads upon the Federal-aid highway programs . . .” The report, to be submitted by February 1, 1955, actually was prepared in two parts. The toll road portion was transmitted on April 14, 1955, still a remarkably short time considering that the Act was not approved until May 6, 1954. For those States in which needs studies had been completed, the information required for the report was not too difficult, but for those States which had not developed needs studies, a heavy workload was imposed.
Looking first at the toll road study transmitted in the report entitled Progress and Feasibility of Toll Roads and Their Relation to the Federal-Aid Program,[15] it found conditions far different than those in the late thirties when Toll Roads and Free Roads was prepared. Traffic volumes had increased, of course, not only in magnitude, but in relation to the adequacy of the road systems with its lagging improvement programs. And 16 years later there was actual toll road experience to go on.
With these favorable conditions, analyses were made, for which some data already had been collected, to show the characteristics of the traffic using the toll roads. The origins and destinations of trips, their purposes, the time and distances involved in the use of toll roads in comparison with alternate free routes, the tolls paid, and the proportion of travel on the existing roads that was diverted to the toll route indicate the types of information used in the analyses. Factors developed from these analyses were applied to all sections of the Interstate System and other routes believed by the States to have toll potential to estimate probable use of toll roads and the revenue the traffic would produce compared with the costs of maintaining, operating and amortizing the investment in the toll facilities. Any proposed toll sections that showed revenues over the amortization period equaling iy 2 times the total cost were considered feasible of toll financing. (The investment bankers of the time insisted on a “coverage” of 1.5. In the Toll Roads and Free Roads study, toll financing was assumed to be justified when the revenue and cost were equal to a “coverage” of 1.0. Thus, the 1954 study was conservative and in line with current practice.)
With the changes over the 16 years, however, 6,700 miles were found to be feasible of toll financing compared to the few hundred that might have been self-liquidating in 1938. All but 200 miles were found to be on the lines of the Interstate System, attesting again to its prime importance. Should it be desired to pool revenues from different routes, as did some States such as Pennsylvania, with the stronger one helping to carry those not quite feasible, additional mileage not measured in the study could have been included in the total.
At the time of the 1954 study, 1,239 miles of toll road were open and 1,382 miles under construction. In addition 3,314 miles had been authorized and another 2,253 miles proposed, exceeding somewhat, in their total of 8,188 miles, the 6,700 miles estimated to be feasible in the study.
Looking back to the 1938 study, it is of interest that every one of the toll roads in use or under construction in 1954 that lay along one of the six routes studied in 1938 was on a section of those routes then found to be among the highest in feasibility. While the magnitudes had changed over the 16-year period, the relative positions had not. This change again exemplifies the psychological effect of the Depression. The 1938 report noted that nearly everyone who could afford a car owned one, that their average incomes were low and that they could ill afford to take long trips, to say nothing of paying tolls. That position was buttressed by the road use studies showing that only 1 percent of trips exceeded 100 miles in length. (Even so they were important, for they produced 25 percent of the vehicle miles.)
But 1954 was a boom period. Cars were better, incomes higher and rising and the new toll roads were giving opportunity for more long trips. (More recent figures show that the percentage of trips of over 100 miles has doubled, indicating that freeways, toll or free, have opened a new market for the highway product, and expanded the horizons of American society.)
With 6,700 miles estimated as feasible of toll financing, more if “pooling” within a State were permitted and perhaps still more if “pooling” on a regional or national basis were accepted, one may wonder why the report did not recommend at least some measure of toll financing in the face of such unmet highway needs and the good public acceptance of toll roads. This question was argued intensely in the Bureau of Public Roads, but in the end it was decided not to recommend any change in the 1921 provision “That all highways constructed or reconstructed under the provisions of this act shall be free of tolls of all kinds.”
Partly it is likely that the Bureau did not wish to depart from such a long-standing provision without some indication of congressional interest; and partly it was the strong belief that a toll-financed system was not desirable. It was reasoned that toll roads, generally with widely spaced entrance and exit points, would not accommodate the predominant short trips, and that the States would have to provide duplicate facilities or at least continue to maintain the existing ones. It was further reasoned that toll collection could not fit well into the urban scene, and there lay at least half the cost and far more than half the problem of the Interstate program. It was reasoned that tolls simply added to user cost and that a free system in the long run would be cheaper and more effective. And it was also reasoned that some States, as a matter of policy, did not favor toll financing (California as the prime example) , and it would be unfair to have a national system part toll and part free. The collecting and pooling of tolls on a national basis for partial support of the system, even though so doing would result in a very direct user charge, was not seriously considered. Thus, Recommendation No. 1 of the 1954 report was that “The present law forbidding the collection of tolls on highways constructed with Federal-aid funds should be continued.”
Recommendation No. 2, however, offered somewhat of a compromise in allowing the inclusion of toll roads in the Interstate System provided adequate roads of another Federal-aid system allowed for continuous travel without traversing the toll sections.
This provision recognized the ridiculous situation that would result if a State must parallel an existing toll road with another road built to Interstate standards in order to provide a complete freeway system. Yet it did provide for continuity of travel on free Federal-aid roads should the traveler make that his choice. Adoption of this recommendation moreover would remove the ambiguity resulting from question as to whether the law prohibited the collection of tolls on any “highway” to which Federal-aid funds were applied, or only to specific projects on such a highway.
At any rate the report was extremely timely. The second toll road era had been in a boom period, and might well have continued were it not for congressional action to greatly increase the Interstate program. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, the Interstate program was almost on dead center. Highway administrators could hardly program projects on sections where a toll road was under construction, nor could toll road authorities do so if there were a prospect of approval of a major increase in Interstate funding by Congress.
What the Congress faced in meeting the challenge was conveyed in the second study required by the 1954 Act, Needs of the Highway Systems, 1955–84, which was transmitted March 25, 1955.[16]
The Post Office in Chicago, Ill., was built several years before, but the city plan called for a highway to run through the building. The highway, open to traffic in 1956, completes the plan.
In the 1944 report recommending the designation of the Interstate System, no attempt was made to estimate its cost, simply because of insufficient information or experience at that time. In 1948 the cost of improving the Interstate System was estimated at about $11 billion, roughly half rural and half urban. Under that proposal, the system in 1968 would have been brought to adequacy for 1948 traffic. In 1950 an estimate was made of the cost of bringing the local rural roads to a state of adequacy. But now for the first time the Congress called for an estimate of the cost of “completing” all systems of roads and streets. And for the first time the estimate could be made with a reasonably realistic projection of the rate of traffic growth based on the experience of the first postwar decade (although even this projection proved to be low). To interpret Congress meaning of “completing” and believing that considerable urgency was now being expressed, it was decided that the plan would call for completing the Interstate System by 1964 and all others by 1974, 10 to 20 years respectively. It was further decided to plan the Interstate System to be adequate in 1964 for 1974 traffic and the others adequate for the current traffic at the time of completion. As in present highway needs studies, the concept of “tolerable” and “desirable” standards was used for the systems other than Interstate, that is accepting sections that would still be adequate at the proposed date of completion of the system, but constructing any that would be inadequate to standards for adequacy for 20 years beyond the assumed date of construction. Construction programs to accomplish these ends were grouped into 5-year periods.
With the conditions spelled out, the States were once again called on for a massive data collection, compilation, and analysis task, seeking the aid of the cities and counties to assist in the areas of their interest. It could be expected that States that had built a considerable mileage of high-standard, controlled-access, divided highways could make realistic estimates of cost, but many such standards were difficult to visualize, and some States having no legal right to control access saw no reason to estimate on that basis. Even so, however, the cost to complete the Interstate System was estimated at $23.2 billion, and for the first 10 years’ program for all other systems $78.6 billion, for a total cost for the 10-year period a “staggering” sum of $101.8 billion. In the next 20 years new construction and some reconstruction on all systems would add $114.4 billion more, for a total construction cost over the 30-year period of $216.2 billion.
As noted earlier, $216 billion can hardly be regarded as a “need.” It is simply the result of the addition of the best estimates that could be made of the cost of achieving the level of service accepted as the basis of the estimate of “completing” the system to that standard.
With no realistic chance of meeting all the “needs” on all the systems, however, the $101 billion figure for the 10-year program (roughly 14 for the Inter- state System which represented only 1 percent of the total highway mileage) focused attention of the cost and urgency of getting on with this most important of all the systems. The report was to have its effect.
The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act
Although the steps leading to the launching of the Interstate program are described in Chapter 9, consideration of some aspects of the manner in which the planning efforts were used in reaching the final decision seems in order, even at the risk of some repetition. While the most immediate use of results of the 1954 study was in connection with legislation relating to the Interstate System, that report was by no means the single, or even the most important, factor in the ultimate congressional action. It did, however, provide the basic information on which two other major attacks on the highway problem were based.
The first factor was the appointment of a committee of the Governors Conference to study the highway program, no doubt to some degree at least inspired by representations from their highway administrators. This committee had easy access, of course, to the results of the needs studies the States were making in response to requirements of the 1954 Federal-Aid Highway Act.
Paralleling this move, action again became evident in the White House, with the appointment by President Eisenhower of the Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program, not only recognizing the deficiencies of the highway system, but emphasizing again the national responsibility for highway transportation. This committee, appointed in September 1954, quickly became known as the Clay Committee, for President Eisenhower named General Lucius D. Clay as its chairman. General Clay had become acutely aware of transportation problems by virtue of having had responsibility for creating and operating the successful Berlin Airlift but a few years earlier.
Thus, once again, a presidentially appointed committee was charged with consideration of the Nation’s highway needs. In contrast to the National Interregional Highway Committee created 13 years earlier, which was a planning committee, the Clay Committee was an action committee. The Interregional Highway Committee spent 3 years in a massive data assembly and analysis program culminating in a plan, but only in the most general recommendations for its implementation through a program. The Clay Committee, in a period of little more than 3 months, in effect recommended an action program to implement the earlier committee’s plan. But both depended almost entirely on planning data assembled, as a result of acts of Congress, by the cooperating efforts of the Bureau of Public Roads and the State highway departments.
The composition of the Clay Committee evidenced this contrast. The Interregional Highway Committee, as described earlier, was heavily “planning” oriented. The Clay Committee, in addition to its chairman, included Stephen I. Bechtel, head of a large and successful contracting organization; David Beck, president of the Teamsters Union; S. Sloan Colt, a member of a New York investment banking firm; and William A. Roberts, president of a company manufacturing large construction machinery. With these sharp differences in background and outlook influenced by the difference in the Committee’s charge, there was one important similarity. In each case the secretary was provided by the Bureau of Public Roads—H. S. Fairbank for the Interregional Highway Committee and Francis C. Turner, then Assistant to Commissioner duPont (later to be Federal Highway Administrator), for the Clay Committee. And in each case, through the secretary, came demands on the Public Roads staff for more data or data compiled or summarized in different ways, the pace deliberate in the case of the earlier committee and feverish in the case of the latter.
In developing its recommendations, the Committee not only had the massive array of data already mentioned, but sought the advice and aid of a group of technical experts representing professional groups and associations of users and of the officials of other levels of government. It also received offerings from 22 national associations in hearings covering several days in the fall of 1954. Significant in its recommendations were the recognition of the problem and an estimate of the programs needed to meet it that pretty much corroborated the conclusions of other groups thinking about the same matters. What stood out as markedly different was the proposal for financing the program. Accepting, as did others generally, that the cost should be met by user taxes, it proposed accelerating the program by resorting to a bond issue. And it proposed the establishment of a new and separate Federal corporation to administer the program, the actual construction of which would still be the responsibility of the States and the Bureau of Public Roads.
That the proposal for financing the program was unique should not have been unexpected. For one thing, even in the face of obvious highway needs over many years, adequate funding had not been authorized by conventional methods. For another, the investment banking influence within the Committee, and the fact that Francis V. duPont, then Commissioner of Public Roads, was experienced in the financial world and one not reluctant to break with tradition, argued that since conventional methods had not worked, a different and possibly more dramatic approach might succeed. In any event, the Clay Committee’s report to the President was transmitted with his strong endorsement to the Congress on February 22, 1955, a month ahead of the report called for by Congress in the 1954 Act. And soon after the “Administration bill,” incorporating the recommendations of the Committee, went from the White House to the Congress.
The Clay Committee’s report for the reasons described in Chapter 9 did not receive favorable acceptance in the Congress. But without doubt it did provide the spark that ignited congressional action, and the ultimate authorization of the greatest public works program in history can be attributed more to Commissioner duPont and the Clay Committee than to any other single factor.
Recognizing the upswinging public demand for improving highway transportation, brought into focus by the Clay Committee’s work and its attendant publicity, the Roads Subcommittee (of the Senate Committee on Public Works), under Senator Albert Gore from Tennessee, began hearings early in February. Senator Gore’s hearings were more extensive and more penetrating than any hearing previously held on the highway program. Every interested group was heard, and the Subcommittee went deeply into all facets of the problem, constantly calling for data on one subject after another, and questioning critically all the material supplied. Commissioner duPont assigned Frank Turner to act as liaison with the Public Works Committee, and he participated in virtually all its meetings, open or in executive session. Regularly he called the Bureau at the noon recess to say that the Committee wanted certain information “for this afternoon’s session” and again in late afternoon to say that the Committee “needs this information by tomorrow morning.” Many Public Roads people worked well into many nights to meet these requests!
Eventually came the “Gore bill” authorizing the needed expanded program and calling for its administration by a commission separated from the Department of Commerce. In a very informal session after the hearings, Senator Gore remarked that at the start of the hearings he had been opposed to heavy participation with Federal funds in a program that he then saw as primarily for the benefit of the States, but that the mass of evidence had “turned him around 360 degrees.” Commissioner duPont observed that that could only mean that he was back where he started! But Senator Gore replied that, of course, he meant 180 degrees, for he’d turned completely in the opposite direction. It was in this good-humored atmosphere that the lengthy hearings ended, with the legislative and executive branches together and in harmony. It was planning data that “turned the Senator around.”
The Senate hearings caused some ruffled feelings at the other end of the Capitol, for there it was maintained that highway legislation traditionally originated on the House side and that by jumping into hearings so early, the Senate had usurped the responsibility of the House. So perhaps not to be outdone, the House, not taking the evidence produced by the Gore Subcommittee, held its own and nearly equally lengthy hearings later in the session. And ultimately it, too, proposed a bill, also for a greatly expanded program with heavy Federal participation, but following more conventional lines of administration.
Thus, toward the very end of the session with three alternatives and with apparently some confusion in signals between the White House and the “Hill,” the proposed program, so heavily supported by the public, went down, not so much by defeat as by default.
The highway interests were dejected. It was reasoned that the 2d session of the 79th Congress would be in an election year and that there was little prospect of enactment or approval of a big money bill in 1956. The program, it was reasoned, would have to await the new Congress in 1957. But the seers evidently reckoned without the public, for when Congress reconvened in 1956, pressure to get on with the highway program was obvious and heavy. The representatives had heard from their constituents during their stay at home between sessions. As described in Chapter 9, the Committee on Public Works and the Committee on Ways and Means collaborated in providing the two-titled Act of 1956. The Interstate program conceived by President Roosevelt, planned by the Interregional Highway Committee, galvanized by the Clay Committee, and finally shaped by the Congress, was about to be realized. Planning After 1956—Statewide and National
Reimbursement for Toll Roads
Among the many and far-reaching effects of the 1956 Act, none was felt more immediately than its impact on toll road construction. The modern toll road era ended abruptly. With the promise of adequate funding coming primarily from Federal rather than State user taxes for early improvement of most of the mileage feasible of toll financing, justification for that method no longer existed. This toll road era, in contrast to the early era, ended not in disaster and bankruptcy, but in a substantial, and still financially sound, contribution to the Nation’s highway transportation needs.
The Congress gave serious consideration to the problems that would arise if most of the toll road mileage were incorporated, as anticipated, into the system. There was much pressure from the user groups to make them free of tolls, but that raised questions as to how the bonds could be retired far ahead of maturity, even should the bond holders agree. The toll road authorities were hardly favorable to going out of business so quickly after they had launched their mostly successful ventures. As a matter of national policy, there was inequity in users of the Interstate System having to pay tolls in some States but not in others, as discussed earlier in the 1955 report to Congress. But what was perhaps not generally nor fully recognized, the 1956 Act did not provide for constructing the Interstate System but for completing it. It was expected that routes or sections already adequate, or that could be made so, for 1975 traffic under the Interstate standards would be included in the System. Any Federal-aid projects in this category would have received Federal aid anyway, even if at the 50–50 or the later 60–40 ratio, but the toll roads had no Federal aid nor State road-user funds applied to their construction. Nevertheless States such as Pennsylvania and New York, with large percentages of their Interstate System already completed by the toll road authorities, felt short changed in relation to States in which small mileage met the Interstate standards and, thus, were scheduled to receive relatively larger amounts of “90–10” money.
In this atmosphere the Congress, by Section 114 of the 1956 Act, called for a report to be made by the Secretary of Commerce, in cooperation with the State highway departments and other agencies as required to aid the Congress,” . . . to determine whether or not the Federal Government should equitably reimburse any State for a portion of a highway which is on the Interstate System, whether toll or free, the construction of which has been completed subsequent to August 2, 1947, or which is either in actual use or under construction by contract, for completion, awarded not later than June 30, 1957 . . .”
The American Association of State Highway Officials, appointed a committee to work with the Bureau of Public Roads in planning the study, and all States provided the needed information. The findings, resulting from the summarization of voluminous data, could be briefly expressed.
In short, the study disclosed that 10,859 miles met the requirement for inclusion in the System, either fully meeting the standards for 1975 traffic or being suitable for upgrading to meet the standards. Less than 2,000 miles were found to be fully adequate, however. Included in the total were 1,950 miles of toll roads in 26 States and 8,909 miles of free roads in 47 States.
The cost of the improvements that had been made within the 10-year period specified (representing the time between the approval of the Interstate System and the effective beginning of the Trust Fund financing) was estimated at $6.09 billion, $2.59 billion for toll roads and $3.50 billion for free roads. The depreciated value was also calculated, the depreciation being very little since the roads were so recently built. Right-of-way was assumed not to depreciate in value; grading and drainage was assumed to depreciate at a rate of 1 percent per year (a life of 100 years), structures at 2 percent, and pavement at 3 percent. On this basis the depreciated value became $5.92 billion, $2.52 billion for toll roads and $3.40 billion for free roads.
The Congress faced something of a dilemma when receiving the report in January 1958. To decide to reimburse would be to reverse its decision of 1956 to provide for the "completion" of the System, and instead, accept 90 percent of its total cost, including sections already built. Probably the practical problem of finding $6 billion overrode any feeling of “inequity,” however, and the decision was to defer consideration until later in the program. That time has not yet come, and one can wonder whether it will.
The Continuing Needs Studies
Congress in 1954, in calling for the report on Needs of the Highway Systems, 1955–1984, set in motion what proved to be nearly continuous examination of the physical and financial problems in the highway transportation area and the development of plans for the years ahead. The report listed the highway needs for all roads and streets over the 30-year period at $216 billion. This figure, later under changing conditions found to be at least 50 percent too low, was still a staggering amount and one patently out of reach. The first result of the study was reflected in the 1956 Act. Title I, The Federal-Aid Highway Act, authorized the program to complete the Interstate System, the authorizations extending through 1969, 13 years ahead. In the same Act the so-called ABC program for primary, secondary, and urban roads was authorized for 3 years, through 1959, instead of for the customary biennium. Thus in this way the Congress picked out of the whole package of needs on all sys- tems, the Interstate System as the most urgent, and provided for it authorizations unprecedented both in length of time and amount.
That the Congress did not overlook the broader needs situation, however, is seen in Title II, The Highway Revenue Act of 1956, that imposed the higher tax schedules to finance the program enacted in Title I. As noted before, it was the joint consideration of highway needs by the Committee on Public Works and the Committee on Ways and Means in 1956, also unprecedented, that cleared the way for passage of the legislation. But the Ways and Means Committee did not stop there. Under section 210, it authorized and directed the Secretary of Commerce, in cooperation with the State highway departments to make an investigation and report to give the Congress “. . . information on the basis of which it may determine what taxes should be imposed by the United States, and in what amounts, in order to assure, insofar as practicable, an equitable distribution of the tax burden among the various classes of persons using the Federal-aid highways or otherwise deriving benefits from such highways." Moreover, it specifically directed that the study should be coordinated with the AASHO Road Test, and with other research activities of the Bureau, and it authorized funds ”as may be necessary” to carry out the investigation.
The final report was due in 1959 but was delayed until 1961, and even then, the conclusions were based on preliminary performance equations derived by the Road Test staff from the still unfinished AASHO Road Test specifically for the section 210 study. A supplementary report was made to Congress in 1965 once the final equations were available, although the differences between the final and preliminary equations were so slight as to make unnecessary any revision of the “210” study conclusions. In all, the series of reports, including four progress reports, occupied 940 pages in printed form.[17]
The “210” report surely equaled in stature the reports on transportation of earlier years, the Eastman Report and the Report of the Board of Investigation and Research, but in its narrower scope and with much more data available, it far exceeded them in accuracy and precision of the information on which to base highway policy.
By the time the 1959 Federal-Aid Highway Act was passed, the more precise engineering estimates of the cost of completing the Interstate System had shown an increase in cost from the $27 billion of the 1956 Act, based on the 1954 planning estimate, to $41 billion. Accompanying the Federal-Aid Highway Act was an amendment to Title II, the Highway Revenue Act, to provide the added funds then seen as needed. Lacking the expected results of the “210” study, the motor-fuel taxes were increased one cent per gallon above the levels set in 1956 as a temporary measure. By 1961 the Congress had received the “210” report entitled Highway Cost Allocation Study, with its estimates of the cost responsibility of the various classes of vehicles based on the preliminary equations from the AASHO Road Test, The Ways and Means Committee, accepting the cost responsibility as calculated by the ”incremental method” and still striving to finance the completion of the System by 1972, recommended continuing the temporary increase in the tax on fuel, made other adjustments of minor nature and, more significantly, increased the tax on trucks from $1.50 to $3.00 per year for each 1,000 pounds over 26,000 pounds in gross weight. (This in effect applied to all trucks with more than 2 axles and all tractor truck semitrailers and full trailers.) With the continued higher fuel tax, applicable to all vehicles, the result was that passenger cars were taxed at just about the rate to cover their cost responsibility and in line with the benefits they were receiving from the program. The tax on the heaviest trucks, on the other hand, despite the large increase in their weight tax, did not come up to the level of the cost they occasioned, but exceeded somewhat the calculable benefits they were receiving. The decision on the truck taxes seemingly was consistent with the wording of section 210 in the 1956 Act which called under paragraph (b) (2) for a determination of the "proportionate share" of the highway costs and paragraph (b) (3) for the benefit of the “use” of the highways by the vehicles of the various classes. The curve of taxes in relation to gross weights resulting from the Committee action lay just about midway between the curves of costs and benefits, and perhaps surprisingly, evoked no great objection from the trucking industry. (One reason that the industry was not unwilling to accept the higher taxes was the strongly implied commitment by the Congress that once sufficient mileage of the Interstate System was open to traffic, the size and weight limits imposed for the first time in Federal legislation in the 1956 Act would be relaxed to the degree the higher design standards would permit. Subsequent legislation to effectuate this understanding failed of passage, however, until the Federal-Aid Highway Amendments of 1974 when modest increases in axle weights and gross vehicle weights were allowed.) It might be noted also that section 210 of the 1956 Act called for a determination of direct or indirect benefits other than from the use of the highways. While the “210” report clearly showed such benefits, the Congress decided to assess the entire cost of the program on the users. The user rates set in 1961 still apply, soundly derived from the results of the AASHO Road Test. While the AASHO Road Test was undertaken to aid in highway pavement design, the first use of its results was in connection with highway economics and finance, and that use alone may well have justified its cost.
The Functional Classification Study
But it became obvious that planning for highways, at least after completion of the Interstate System if not earlier, must be undertaken, planning not only for programs to meet the upcoming needs, but to finance them. One of the striking facts to come out of the 1954 estimate of cost of completing the several highway systems, updated by the section 210 study, was the inadequacy of the Secondary System in relation to the rural Primary System and urban portions of the Primary and Secondary Systems. Also revealed was the disparity among the States as to the mileage of the Federal-Aid Secondary System, varying from as little as 6 percent of the rural highway mileage in one State to 39 percent in another. Obviously the concept of what should constitute a Federal-aid secondary route needed definition. While the national total had little significance except to illustrate the problem, it is of interest that the estimate of highway needs prepared in connection with the 210 study showed the needs from 1956 to 1971 on the Federal-aid primary routes, other than Interstate, in relation to the needs on the Federal-aid secondary roads under State control (about what the 1944 Act called principal secondary and feeder roads) to be in the ratio of 43.5:17.6, compared to the authorization ratio of 45:30 then still in effect. Obviously two aspects needed investigations. 
In 1960 intercity travel studies showed this basic travel pattern.
First the roads to be included in the Federal-aid system should be designated under a functional classification definition applicable to all States, and second the general level of Federal aid for rural secondary roads in relation to that for other systems, particularly in the urban area, needed review. It could be considered a restudy and perhaps a restatement of purpose of the Federal-aid secondary program after its 20-year history.
These thoughts and others were brought to the attention of the States by Federal Highway Administrator Rex Whitton in a 1963 speech. He outlined some of the problems and sketched the planning effort that would be required to analyze them and hopefully reach a concensus on how to meet them. AASHO authorized a high-level committee to cooperate with the Bureau of Public Roads to carry out the necessary studies and develop appropriate recommendations to be presented in a report to the Congress.
The Cooperating Committee, as it was designated, met with its Bureau counterparts in the spring of 1964 and agreed upon a format for the study. It was to be the most intensive study of highway needs yet undertaken, covering all roads and streets. The most significant new aspect was functional classification, with roads and streets segregated in three broad classes—arterial, collector, and local. Freeways would be a special category of the arterial group. The classification would be determined route by route by its estimated future traffic, not simply by volume alone but by the character of the traffic, trip length being an important determinant. This basis of classification had been used in a preliminary way in an earlier study by AASHO and the National Association of County Officials (NACO) in a review of rural highway needs, but little experience was available as a guide to urban street classification and none at all in areas yet to be urbanized. Since the period to be covered extended from 1972 to 1990 and with the rapidly increasing urbanization of the country, this latter situation presented a considerable problem. Fortunately, however, the urban transportation studies had by then progressed sufficiently in about 100 cities to permit the development of models that would show, on the basis of area and population, the number of lane-miles of streets needed in each category. So where the urban studies would not permit detailed estimates, at least gross figures could be produced by resorting to the models. With facts thus assembled, estimates could be made of the desirable extent of systems on a functional basis that could be compared with the systems then designated as “administrative” systems. (The study eventually con- firmed that the Primary Systems in most States were well selected, but that as anticipated, the Secondary Systems as administratively designated in many States were badly distorted.)
On the basis of the agreed upon format, the Bureau staff, with advice from the Committee as needed, prepared the necessary manuals, and approval to begin the study came in the summer of 1964. The target date for the report to Congress was set as January 1967.
Then began a cooperative approach to data collection on a national basis, heretofore unequaled in the transportation field. The National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties formally designated members to form a joint committee with AASHO to oversee the work of data collection and analysis. At its first meeting in early 1965, one member remarked that it was significant that for the first time officially designated representatives of State, county, and city governments had convened in a formal meeting. It was further significant that it met in the offices of the Bureau of Public Roads. It reflected intergovernmental cooperation in fact, not just in theory. While ultimately an important product emerged from this initial meeting, its bright promise was never fully realized.
It was during the period of this study that several factors appeared to complicate, delay, and confuse the planning of highway programs after 1972, the scheduled date of completion of the Interstate program. It might be said that prior to this study, highways had been planned in isolation. While the major planning studies, particularly in urban areas, recognized the need for coordination between highway and other modes of transportation and took those modes into consideration, the highway program as authorized by the Congress had gone ahead as an independent program. It was during this period that questions began to be raised as to whether there should be “alternatives” to the highway program. Transit interests began to speak with a stronger voice in the Congress, as evidenced by the establishment in 1964 of the Urban Transportation Administration in the Housing and Home Finance Agency (in 1965 this Agency became a part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)). The larger cities began to see their overall needs for transportation, and even for streets and highways, diverging from the programs envisioned by the States.
As noted earlier, each of the major reports on highway needs—1939, 1944, and 1955—had been initiated by the executive branch, but each had the added strength of being carried on by the paralleling direction of an act of Congress. So too in the 1964 study was the paralleling action initiated by the Public Works Committee of the House, which passed unanimously a bill calling for a report on the highway needs of the Nation to be submitted in January 1967, the target date of the AASHO study of which the Committee was well aware. That bill died in the Senate, which reasoned that the organic legislation required annual reports by the Bureau of Public Roads anyway, so no specific legislation was needed. The following year, 1965, Representative George H. Fallon, then Chairman of the House Public Works Committee, introduced a somewhat similar bill, which finally emerged as a Joint Resolution, S.J. Res. 81, instructing the Secretary of Commerce, acting through the Bureau of Public Roads, to “. . . report to Congress in January, 1968, and in January of every second year thereafter, his estimate of the future highway needs of the Nation.” Thus, it appeared that the way was cleared for the cooperative studies to continue by the traditional coordinated direction of the legislative and executive branches of the Federal Government. The highway program, it was assumed, would continue to be an independently authorized, although cooperatively developed, program.
If the Congress accepted that the program planned cooperatively could best be authorized independently, that view was not necessarily accepted by the executive branch. The Bureau of the Budget, through which all reports to Congress involving Federal funds in any amount then must pass, as early as 1961 when the "210" report was being reviewed, reasoned that any emphasis on the nonuser benefits might encourage the application of general funds rather than exclusively road-user funds to support the program and that to do so would be in the direction of unbalancing the Federal budget. This position was taken even though the Congress in authorizing the study had specifically called for an investigation of benefits to other than highway users.
Meanwhile as the plans for the study moved ahead, it became apparent that with the massive data collection and analyses required for the functional classification of all roads and streets in all jurisdictions, completion of a report by 1967 was out of the question. Yet, with the final apportionments for the Interstate program to be made in 1969 to meet the scheduled completion date, there was real urgency to provide facts to the Congress to serve as a basis for the post-Interstate program because extensive hearings and a searching review of highway needs comparable to that of 1955 and 1956 were anticipated. The AASHO Cooperating Committee, renamed by then the Committee on the Continuing Highway Program, concluded that the Congress must be furnished at least gross estimates of foreseeable needs as soon as possible and decided to ask the States to provide estimates not on the basis of functional systems to be designated as a result of the study, but on the basis of the current administrative systems. This estimate would be furnished as an “introductory” or “preliminary” report to give scale to the magnitude of the needed program, with refinements, once the functional classification could be completed. On the basis of this decision, ratified by the AASHO executive committee in Atlanta at the annual meeting in 1964, new manuals were prepared and work moved quickly ahead on the truncated study. This was followed by the much more deliberate and complex work of functional classification and related studies of other aspects of future needs, including such elements as the greater attention to safety and environmental considerations and bases for apportionment of funds not only among the systems, but among the States and local jurisdictions. This decision was made fully workable by the passage of S.J. Res. 81 a few months later. As a result, it became possible to furnish information to the Congress on different aspects of the upcoming problems on a continuing and timely basis at the biennial intervals specified in the resolution rather than in a massive single report comparable to the 1961 Highway Cost Allocation Study (the 210 study).
Highway planning at statewide and national levels seemed to be launched on a course that would lead to regular reporting to the Congress of needs for highway transportation, determined cooperatively by Federal, State and local officials, keeping abreast of changing technology in all transportation modes and of changing social and economic conditions. Most importantly, the study efforts provided the groundwork and guidelines for the broader studies embracing all modes of transportation that would be undertaken in the future.
The Movement Toward Transportation Studies
Before the 1968 report had been completed, another change at the Federal level further complicated the longstanding relationship between the Bureau of Public Roads, the Congress, and the State highway departments—the establishment of the Department of Transportation. Later the relationships were to become still more complex as departments of transportation were created in many States, a factor having an especially trying effect on the Bureau’s longtime partner, the American Association of State Highway Officials, which eventually absorbed or was absorbed by the State DOT officials as the name of the organization was changed to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. The cordial relations between the Bureau, the States, and the Congress of earlier, simpler times was lost, perhaps never to be regained. Among the functions included in the new Department were those of the Bureau of Public Roads, which together with a new National Highway Safety Bureau formed the Federal Highway Administration; of the Federal Aviation Agency, formerly an independent agency, which became the Federal Aviation Administration; of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, transferred bodily from the Department of Housing and Urban Development; and the functions of a new unit, the Federal Railroad Administration. All these were termed "modal" administrations headed by “modal” administrators. The purpose was, of course, to bring about better coordination of the Federal effort in the different modes under a national transportation policy to be developed by the Secretary. The first incumbent of that office was Allen Boyd, formerly Under Secretary for Transportation in the Department of Commerce, and with the change in administration in 1969, he was succeeded by John Volpe, formerly Federal Highway Administrator and, at that time, Governor of Massachusetts. Both men were qualified by solid experience in transportation and in administration.
While the assembly of transportation functions in a single department of the executive branch was a forward step, coordination of programs could hardly be fully effective so long as three different congressional committees on each end of the Capitol retained jurisdiction over the different functional areas. And to complicate coordination still more, three administrations were “modal” in fact, aviation, railroads, and highways. But urban mass transportation was not modal at all, but geographic and functional in its area of responsibility.
In the planning area, still another complicating factor was the establishment within the Federal High-way Administration of the Office of Policy Planning. This office was not to take any functions from the Bureau of Public Roads’ Office of Planning, but to work with other modal administrations, with the Secretary’s staff, and with other agencies such as the Bureau of the Budget in general policy matters. One function was shepherding reports, such as the 1968 Highway Needs Report, to Congress through the approval channels within the Department and the Bureau of the Budget. The office was also expected to consider and propose long-range policy and action programs in the areas of highways and highway safety, but for various reasons, principally inability to staff the office adequately, it never quite reached its anticipated potential. The major efforts in planning remained, as intended, within the Bureau. Subsequently a reorganization under Secretary Volpe brought the functions together, as Francis Turner, who served as Director of Public Roads under Lowell Bridwell, the first Federal Highway Administrator under the Secretary of Transportation, succeeded Bridwell with the change in administration. The new Office of Planning was organized in two sub- offices each under a director, one called Policy Planning that dealt generally with long-range planning and relationships with other government agencies and the Congress, and one called Highway Planning that dealt primarily with the cooperative planning and programing activities of the States and local jurisdictions. It was within the Office of Highway Planning that research and development in the planning method produced the striking advances in transportation planning, particularly at metropolitan scale, but also extended the statewide and national scale as well.
Even with all these complicating factors, the 1968 National Highway Needs Report[18] was transmitted to Congress by Secretary Boyd, the report having been approved by the Bureau of the Budget on January 31, 1968, meeting the requirements of S.J. Res. 81. In line with the AASHO decision, it included a gross estimate of costs, as estimated by the State highway departments, of bringing the administrative systems up to standards agreed upon by the joint AMA–AASHO–NACO[N 1] committees and the Federal agencies, including the Bureau of the Budget. By emphasizing that the estimate was that of the State highway departments, Federal endorsement was avoided, and perhaps with justification, considering that the cost of improvements needed to meet the accepted standards totaled $294 billion for the 20-year period 1965 to 1985. There was concern that the sheer magnitude of the estimate, without similar estimates of 20-year needs in other modes, might induce such substantial increase in Federal authorizations for highways that other modes might suffer, relatively at least, if not absolutely.
The $294 billion figure was indeed a staggering figure, although not so startling when considered on the basis of cost per vehicle-miles of travel as later studies reported, and it stood in sharp contrast to the cost estimated by the States in the 1954 study of $216 billion for the 30-year period of 1955 to 1984. The difference reflected higher design standards, higher urban costs brought about by the unanticipated urbanization of the country, higher unit construction prices, and just the added costs occasioned by delays in meeting current needs as they developed.
In general terms the report outlined a desirable direction of future policy as follows:
1. Continuing assistance to the States for improving the efficiency and safety of the highway system in both rural and urban areas. (Studies would be necessary to redefine the Federal-aid systems and enable sound economic analyses to reveal how and where the investment of Federal funds would be most beneficial in terms of national objectives; general economic and social benefits; and transportation service to people and commerce.)
2. Greater stress than in the past on the improvement of urban transportation and the development of transportation plans calculated to raise the quality and satisfaction of urban life.
3. Additional emphasis on the coordination of highways with other modes of transport, both intra- and interurban, to ensure the optimum provision of the best features of all modes and continuing emphasis on making the highway a salutary influence on the environment, both in rural and urban areas.
- ↑ American Municipal Association–American Association of State Highway Officials–National Association of County Officials.
Land and air transportation cross paths at Stapleton International Airport over Interstate 70 in Denver, Colo.
More specifically the 1968 National Highway Needs Report discussed the need for a functional classification study and gave considerable attention to transportation needs in urban areas, quite reminiscent of similar discussions in the reports of 1939 and 1944. It also explored in a limited way the problems of developing highway or other transportation programs at metropolitan scale and suggested specifically that the planning agencies responsible for the urban transportation planning process in those areas be required to develop 5-year construction programs based on the planning data. Under the proposal, the State highway department could include in its program for any area only projects included in the 5-year program. It would not be required to program any projects in the area, but it could not program projects in the area that were not in the 5-year program. This proposal was calculated to insure that any improvements carried out by a highway department in a metropolitan area would be in harmony with the needs of the area. At the same time, the metropolitan officials could not infringe on the responsibility of the State highway department in developing its statewide programs. Hopefully this would reduce the areas of disagreements between the States and local and neighborhood interests within the metropolitan areas, already, in an increasing number of cases, becoming irritating if not actually destructive of implementation of long-range plans.
This proposal was the first attempt at the Federal level to bring metropolitan area officials directly into the programing of projects, and was entirely consistent with section 9 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962, in which the Congress in establishing the “3C” (continuing, cooperative, comprehensive) process directed that “. . . the Secretary shall cooperate with the States . . . in the development of long-range highway plans and programs . . .” By that time the planning process was well in hand but little, virtually nothing in fact, was being done cooperatively with respect to programs.
The Congress received the report and published it as a “Committee Print,” not giving it the stature of the previous reports that were published as House Documents. The only specific action it took with respect to the report, however, was to affirm what the States and the Bureau of Public Roads already had in progress, the functional classification of all roads and streets. Section 17 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968 stated:
The Secretary of Transportation shall, in the report to Congress required to be submitted by January 1970 . . . include the results of a systematic nationwide functional highway classification study to be made in cooperation with the State highway departments and local governments . . . desirable as one of the bases for realigning Federal highway programs to better meet future needs and priorities.
This section, by specifically including local governments in the planning, in effect required exactly what AASHO and the Bureau of Public Roads had undertaken in establishing the Cooperative Committee in 1964 and which by then was well along toward a conclusion. The provision in the Act assured that the information as assembled by the States and local governments would reach the Congress.
Review of the major studies during the 30 years following the 1939 report and the subsequent actions of Congress show clearly that the significant changes in policy followed careful review of deliberate planning studies by the Congress. While Federal Highway Administrator Bridwell chose to separate the function called policy planning from program planning, the planning that had been carried on under the Hayden-Cartwright Act of 1934, in retrospect, was in itself policy planning, although conceived more to aid in developing sound construction and financial programs in the State, the results when assembled on a neutral basis gave Congress the facts on which to base its policy decisions. Of course, times were simpler and the program then could be considered almost in isolation. In more recent years urbanization, environmental considerations, competition among modes, and other factors have complicated planning and action, and with the greatly enlarged programs, the stakes are much higher. However, review of the Federal-aid highway acts from about 1968 onward shows clear evidence that the Congress has been responding to outside pressures to an increasing decree and relying less on the product of planning. Perhaps the committees tend to disregard the results of planning, or perhaps planning does not or cannot respond to the accelerated pace of current life. Whatever the reason, planning seems to have played a smaller part in guiding the highway program in the last few years than in earlier decades. While advances were made in planning at the metropolitan level, particularly in the area of intermodal coordination (at the direction of Congress and with added funding for that specific purpose), similar insistence on broad planning as a prelude to national decisionmaking seems to be in abeyance.
It is difficult to know when history should end, as it merges gradually into contemporary life, and when reporting begins. In this chapter, the purpose was to describe how the planning process developed and how the results of the planning aided or led to policy decisions and action programs. But in view of the confusion with respect to both policy and action at the Federal level in the last 5- or 6-year period, and without the damping effect of time to permit viewing recent, almost contemporary, actions in reasonable perspective, it seems presumptuous to try to attach historic significance to recent actions. True, the Congress has had the benefit of the periodic reports it directed to be made, and in the past few years, it has also directed the executive branch to make many special studies and has generally taken some action as a result. But most often these studies applied to special problems of a particular State or area, to proposals advanced by special interest groups, or to fringe or minor aspects of broader programs. While a recitation of the impact on planning of some of these actions is of interest in revealing the course of Federal action, it is simply that—a recitation, not an account of history.
The 1970 Highway Needs Study
The 1970 Highway Needs Keport was transmitted to Congress in January 1970. This report listed, State-by-State, all road and street mileage classified in two ways, by administrative system and by functional systems, the latter as best it could be determined by general criteria in the time available. As expected, the comparison showed reasonably good coincidence between the Federal-Aid Primary System and the system of principal arterials in the rural areas of 113,000 miles so classified, 104,000 miles being on the Federal-Aid Primary System. Of the mileage not on the Primary System, 5,400 miles were on the Federal-Aid Secondary System and 3,600 miles were not on either, indicating the desirability of some re- visions upward of those routes in system hierarchy.
On the other hand, some 21,000 miles of collector routes, at best candidates for secondary status, were on the Federal-Aid Primary System, and 75,000 miles of strictly local routes had been included administratively in a Federal-aid system, 74,400 miles on the Secondary and 600 miles inexplicably on the Primary Systems.
More detailed review of the figures would show the disparity between functional and administrative classification to be far greater in some States than in others—as noted earlier, the rural Federal-Aid Secondary System as a percentage of all rural roads in the State ranged from 6 to 39 percent. This disparity simply resulted from State policies of selecting the most heavily traveled routes not on the Primary System (and some no doubt qualifying for that System) and improving them to high standards. Other States preferred to spread their secondary funds as widely as possible. This situation, 35 years after the first authorization of secondary funds, was a far cry from the role of secondary road construction envisioned by Fairbank and MacDonald when they proposed holding the system to 10 percent of the rural mileage. With no clear support from Congress for a limitation on system mileage, the Bureau of Public Roads adopted a policy of approving most of what the States requested in system additions, holding the additions hopefully to a mileage to give “program latitude” rather than requiring more specific criteria. But after 35 years some hard rethinking appeared to be in order.
Although disparity in rural classification existed, that in the urban areas was far more pronounced, accounted for by the fact that Federal aid in urban areas was still limited to projects on extensions of rural Federal-aid primary or secondary routes. As should be expected, while 32,000 miles of urban arterials were on the Federal-Aid Primary System and 22,000 on the Secondary System, some 40,000 miles were not on either. This situation was the result of the concept of authorizing Federal aid in urban areas only for segments of statewide systems that lay geographically in those areas. Even that concept was a considerable advance from the original total prohibition of any Federal aid within urban areas of over 2,500 population. The Congress had never previously viewed Federal aid as appropriate for improving an arterial system for local urban travel.
The Movement to Support Urban Needs
The Congress by the 1968 Act, responding to continued urging to give greater support to urban needs, authorized a new program, the Urban Area Traffic Operations Improvement Program. This program quickly became known as the TOPICS program, an accronym for Traffic Operations Program to Improve Capacity and Safety. It recognized that extension of the freeway system into urban areas had relieved traffic congestion on many arterials but, by the location and design of interchanges, had imposed heavier volumes on other arterials or city streets on which cities were not prepared to finance improvements. Congress also recognized that generally the traffic operations systems in urban areas were not receiving the full advantage of modern traffic engineering techniques, due primarily to lack of funds. To alleviate these conditions, $200 million was authorized for each of fiscal years 1970 and 1971, with the normal matching rates. And the Act required that projects to be included in the program be based on the results of the “3C” process.
The TOPICS program was slow in getting started, and complaints were heard that the requirement for relation to the nature and cost of the projects. Be- studies prescribed by the Act was too exacting in yond that, the "3C" process applied to urbanized areas (those with populations of 50,000 or more), and the TOPICS program was applicable to all urban areas, so many new studies had to be undertaken. Subsequently, the authorizing legislation was amended to require the application of the “3C” process only to projects within the urbanized areas.
This is South Street in Pittsfleld, Mass., which has been improved under the TOPICS program. Items eligible for such funding include construction of the islands and smoother alinement, installation of signals and lights, pavement markings for left and right turns and crosswalks, and channelization for turning traffic, all of which improve traffic flow and safety.
By 1970 urban pressures had become still heavier, and calls for Federal aid for public transportation in the larger cities were becoming louder and stronger. Many voices urged diverting funds from the Highway Trust Fund to aid mass transportation, particularly rail rapid transit where capital costs were so high. Congress responded in small measure through the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1970 in two specific ways—authorization of a new system, the Federal-Aid Urban System, and of expenditures of funds on exclusive bus lanes.
The authorization of the Urban System presumably was attributable, at least in part, to the findings of the 1970 Highway Needs Study, which focused attention on the disparity between functional and administrative systems in urban areas, as well as to the increasing demands of city officials for more Federal aid. The study in effect confirmed their position. Thus the new system concept was established. The Federal-Aid Primary and Secondary Systems would still extend into and through urban areas to form a connected statewide network. The Urban System would, in urbanized areas, serve the heaviest corridors and major centers of activity to aid intra-city movement. No route on the Urban System could be on another Federal-aid system, and each route must connect with another route on the Urban System or one of the other Federal-aid systems. And the System must be selected by the appropriate local officials and the State highway departments in cooperation (the local officials appeared first, it may be noted) and on the basis of the “3C” process.
That this step in recognition of urban street and highway needs was taken rather gingerly is seen in the funding authorized for the different programs. Funds were continued for the fiscal years 1972 and 1973 at its same level as for 1970 and 1971 for the “ABC” program, and with the traditional 45-30 distribution between them. The $1.1 billion authorization was divided 45 percent for projects on the Primary System, and 30 percent for those on the Secondary System, each available for either rural or urban portions. The remaining 25 percent was available only for sections on either system within urban areas. In addition, $100 million was authorized for each year for the new Urban System, but as an offset, the authorization for TOPICS was reduced from $200 million to $100 million. As another apparent offset to this foot-in-the-door approach to aiding urban areas, $125 million was authorized for projects on the Federal-Aid Primary and Secondary Systems only outside urban areas, 60 percent on the Primary and 40 percent on the Secondary Systems. Finally 50 percent of the authorization for Federal-aid primary and secondary funds for use in urban areas could be applied to the Urban System.
The other significant departure from tradition was seen in section 111 of the 1970 Act which authorized the use of Federal-aid funds for the construction of exclusive or preferential bus lanes, and for facilities such as bus loading areas, shelters, and fringe or corridor parking areas to serve bus or other mass transportation passengers. This action gave specific authorization to a program for encouraging the greater use of buses, an idea that had been urged for several years by the Bureau of Public Roads.[19] Administratively the Bureau of Public Roads had held that it would be appropriate to reserve a lane for the exclusive use of buses if so doing permitted the movement of more passengers than would result from its general use by all vehicles. Despite Bureau, and later Federal Highway Administration, urging, few State highway departments had been sympathetic to this approach to aiding urban public transportation, California and Wisconsin being notable exceptions.
By the time the Federal- Aid Highway Act of 1973 was approved on August 13 of that year, the 4-system hierarchy, initiated in the 1970 Act, had become firmly established, and authorizations were made in terms of the new concept. With the Interstate System funds authorized under earlier legislation, the old ABC 45–30–25 relationship was finally dropped, and authorizations made separately for the Federal-aid highway rural, Federal-aid secondary rural, and Federal-aid urban programs. The annual amounts for the last 2 years, 1975 and 1976, of the 3-year authorization, built up slightly from 1973, were $700 million for primary rural, $400 million for secondary rural, and $800 million for urban. In addition $300 million was authorized for extensions of the Federal-Aid Primary and Secondary Systems within urban areas.
Other provisions of the 1973 Act showed more positive concern over the urban program. The authority to construct highway facilities for public bus transportation was extended to include participation in the purchase of buses, and after July 1, 1975, for the construction of fixed-rail facilities and the purchase of rolling stock from Federal-aid urban funds. No new authorization of funds was provided, however, and to benefit from such applications of funds, a city must have the project included in the program of the State highway department.
A more significant departure, however, permitted a State, at the request of local officials and when found to be in accordance with the results of the “3C” process, to delete Interstate System links and apply the amount of funds thus saved to a nonhighway public transportation system. The funds involved would not come from the Highway Trust Fund, however, but would be drawn in the same amount from general funds.
Another provision authorized $50 million for each of 3 years for a “special urban high density traffic program,” for the construction of highways, not more than 10 miles in length, connecting to the Interstate System, if conforming to the results of the “3C” process, in areas of high population density and heavy traffic congestion that will serve the urgent needs of commercial, industrial, airport, or national defense installations.
Still another section of the 1973 Act redefined the manner of selecting the Urban System by requiring not that it be selected by local officials and the State highway departments in cooperation, but by “. . . the appropriate local officials . . . with the concurrence of the State highway departments . . . ,” thus moving a step beyond the 1970 Act in enlarging the authority of the local officials. The System still must be in conformity with the “3C” process, however, which is a cooperative process.
These provisions and others relating to special interests or matters of local concern cannot help but leave the impression that the Congress was acting more on the basis of accommodating different groups or interests in program details or in minor expansion of traditional boundaries of highway policy than on the basis of long-range plan or policy goals. That the periodic needs studies were not without their influence, however, is seen in the provision in section 148 of the 1973 Act that called upon the States to designate three Federal-aid systems. The first was to be the Federal-Aid Primary System, including extensions into and through urban areas. The second was to be the Federal-Aid Secondary System, now to be confined to rural areas. And the third was to be the Federal-Aid Urban System in all urbanized areas and in smaller urban areas that the State highway department might want to designate. The systems were to be designated on the basis of their functional use as anticipated in 1980, which necessitated perceptive planning of routes by function in areas yet to be urbanized or developed in other ways. All the system designations were to be effective after June 30, 1976.
In a requirement for earlier action, another section of the 1973 Act called for the designation of “Priority Primary Routes.“ These routes were to be high traffic sections to supplement the Interstate System by ”. . . furnishing needed adequate traffic collector and distributor facilities . . .“ These routes were to be selected by the State highway departments in “consultation” (not cooperation) with appropriate local officials. The States were to make an initial selection of such routes and estimate and report to Congress by July 1974 their cost. Without specific mileage limitation, this provision was as open-ended as the initial authorization of the Federal-Aid Secondary System. But funds increasing from $100 million in 1974 to $300 in 1976 were authorized.
Perhaps the most significant policy statement of this or other recent acts was the “Declaration of Policy” under section 107. This section declared that “. . . since the Interstate System is now in the final phase of completion it shall be the national policy that increased emphasis be placed on construction and reconstruction of the other Federal-aid systems . . . in order to bring all of the Federal-aid systems up to standards and to increase the safety of these systems to the maximum extent.” This policy declaration presumably would curtail, and hopefully end, the bit-by-bit extensions of the Interstate System. The Interstate System upon its completion, delayed and in some areas curtailed as it was, will be fulfilling admirably, even beyond expectations as to its traffic services and economic benefits, the concept laid down by Congress in 1944. It was in anticipation of this that AASHO and Public Roads began the post-Interstate studies in 1964, studies that reached fruition, at least in part, by this provision nearly a decade later.
Statewide Highway Planning
At State level following passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, planning efforts began rapid expansion. The planning entailed in the early stages of the Interstate program, particularly in the urban areas, a greatly enlarged scope of responsibility—in addition to the amount of work involved, its broadened planning to encompass financial and economic areas and increasingly, the consideration of social and environmental aspects of the highway programs. Fortunately, because planning funds available were a fixed percentage of the apportionments, the increased amounts apportioned for construction under the 1956 Act meant substantial increases in planning funds. Certainly no other general planning or transportation planning program ever was so strongly funded in relation to current planning needs. Even though in the early years of the post-1956 period funds quite amply met the needs, as more and more elements were added to the planning responsibility, this relative affluence soon disappeared.
All States accepted as a matter of course the necessity for keeping planning data current, and many utilized the facts collected in response to studies called for by Congress as a basis for developing statewide plans and programs embracing all road systems. Many reviewed their system designations, and some repeated their earlier statewide needs studies. More attention was paid to long-range programing and efforts were made to provide analytical bases for project annual improvement needs for the 10- and 20-year program periods.
Many States adopted the “sufficiency rating” approach, which rated each road section on the basis of its traffic capacity, structural adequacy, and safety. This approach was based partly on planning data, but more on visual observation of current conditions by an annual inventory. It resulted in a listing of projects on the basis of their current adequacy, or “sufficiency,” as opposed to the longer range “deficiencies,” more commonly reported in the broader needs studies. Knowing the funds to be available for a coming year, a State could develop a construction program simply by going down the list of sections starting with the one currently least sufficient until the available funds were all committed. While this was perhaps not planning, in that it emphasized only current conditions, it was a useful administrative tool because it permitted the highway department to demonstrate to the public that its current program was directed toward correcting the most severe deficiencies, as determined on an objective rating scale. Objections to this approach were that it did not reveal the real future needs, but simply provided an orderly way to distribute currently available funds.
Other States, after the completion of the AASHO Road Test in Illinois, made efforts to adapt to their programing procedures the methods used by the road test staff to determine when a section had been so badly damaged as to justify its being retired from further testing, or in short, failed. The method em-ployed a profilometer or a roughometer to measure periodically the deterioration in riding quality, section by section. These readings did more than provide an objective basis for deciding that a section had failed. It was found in analysis that the trends in current riding quality measurements, called the “present serviceability rating,” could also be used as a reliable prediction of when failure would occur. It offered, in effect, a different approach to the life expectancy of pavements by an analytical rather than by the earlier actuarial approach and section by section rather than simply by pavement types. Some States reasoned that similar trends of serviceability ratings could show when particular sections of routes on their highway systems would need replacement, and saw in that approach a means not only of anticipating annual program needs for several years ahead, but possibly another approach to developing long-range plans—a synthesis approach—and with cooperation from the Bureau of Public Roads explored the area with some success. One of the early applications of this approach was made by the New York Thruway Authority in estimating its long-range major maintenance and replacement programs.
By various approaches individual States were successful in developing and keeping reasonably current long-range plans and, to a less satisfactory degree, medium and short-range programs, generally based on objective planning processes. States probably were then and now are better able than the national government to develop transportation policies objectively.
Increasingly States are gearing their transportation policies and plans to general land use development policies. Connecticut and Wisconsin offer early examples of transportation considerations as a key element in implementing desirable land use policies, with the highway departments, and more recently in some cases transportation departments, joining with other State departments in developing the long-range goals and policies. Wisconsin also offers an early example of forecasting transportation needs by a sophisticated simulation model developed as an outgrowth of the urban transportation models expanded to statewide scope. Illinois was another State entering early into the use of statewide simulation models. Increasingly States are coming to accept the futility of attempting any longer to develop a highway policy in isolation from other modes of transportation, or to develop a transportation policy except as an integral element of an overall land use development policy, a view the Congress has yet to accept.
At the beginning of this chapter, the question was raised as to whether in the United States any highway planning was carried on or whether what is called highway planning more realistically is highway improvement planning. Alaska was cited as an exception. It so happened that an opportunity to illustrate this distinction came with the Alaska Highway Study.
In the early 1930’s, engineers planned to make the St. Croix River a part of a proposed Lake Superior-Mississippi River canal. However, in 1968 Congress made the Upper St. Croix part of the national system of wild and scenic rivers. Later the Wisconsin Division of Highways developed a wayside and canoe landing along State highway 35 and negotiated scenic easements to assure that a 200-foot strip along the river and the highway will remain in its natural state.
Under section 13 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962, the Secretary of Commerce was authorized, in cooperation with the State of Alaska, to make a study of the adequacy of the Federal-aid highway system, to make specific recommendations for construction of roads through undeveloped areas, and to recommend a feasible program, including the sharing of cost responsibilities, for implementing the recommendations. Although the Act authorized funds, no funds were appropriated in that year, so the study could not be undertaken until $400,000, half the original authorization, were appropriated in 1963. Through the Bureau of Public Roads, two consultants were employed, qualified by experience in economic and engineering areas and by previous work in Alaska. Their report, completed early in 1966, was forwarded to Congress in May of that year.
Briefly the consultants found that the current Federal-aid systems, primary and secondary, adequately served the population in Alaska, in fact more nearly meeting desirable standards than in any of the “lower 48” States. It could be anticipated that the entire system could be brought up to desirable standards within 16 years with the continuation of the current rate of authorizations. As to highway needs in undeveloped areas, the consultants found virtually none. Although it was recognized that natural resources would be developed, what specific resources in what specific areas would warrant development could not be forecast. Thus, the consultants concluded that a small amount of funds should be available to draw upon when and if a potential resource development prospect appeared.
What Alaska needed most was assistance in funding maintenance. Extraordinary maintenance problems existed because of snow and cold, and the use of Federal aid for maintenance was, as elsewhere, prohibited by law. Because of its great area, Alaska received a large amount of Federal aid in relation to other States. Alaska’s matching ratio, because of the preponderance of land in public holding, was about 5 percent State and 95 percent Federal, relatively little State matching in contrast to other States. However, with small population and few vehicles, even with relatively high road-user taxes, virtually all highway revenue was required to match Federal aid, and maintenance had to be financed from general funds.
The reasoning, perhaps unexpected, with respect to the place of the highway in resource development, was interesting and could well be an example for those promoting development in other areas. Alaska is tremendously rich in natural resources, but little was then economically feasible for development due to its remoteness from population centers and its dependence upon highway transportation. Its timber resources are close to tidewater. At the time of the study, oil production was close to or in tidewater. Exploration of the vast potential of the North Slope would not be brought on simply by the existence of a highway, although if other factors made its exploration feasible ( as now has occurred), a highway to permit pipeline construction and maintenance would be a necessity. Similarly the Rampart Dam, when and if justified, would require a highway connection, but building a highway to the site would hardly initiate its construction. Tourism, a growing factor of the economy despite high prices and the great distance from population centers, would require no new highway development, for most of its scenic features, its glaciers and mountain peaks, and its hunting and fishing areas are within easy reach of the present system. And there is no way to judge whether any of the widely scattered mineral resources would be feasible for development simply as a result of highway improvement. Thus, the recommendation of a small “drawing account” for development roads should resource development in unanticipated locations be found feasible.
The consultants proposed three alternates. The first would authorize additional appropriations from general funds to aid the State in maintenance and in constructing tertiary non-Federal-aid system development roads where and when opportunity appeared. The second would allow the use of regular Federal-aid funds for tertiary road construction. Both alternates would provide also for improvement in the ferry system, as the “marine highway” system is economically more desirable than attempting to provide land transportation between certain points, such as connecting Juneau, the capital, to other parts of the State. The third alternate simply would authorize the use of a portion of regular Federal-aid funds for maintenance. All three alternates contemplated special authorizations for a 5-year period.
The Department of Commerce rejected the first alternate as not complying “with the President’s guidelines for budgetary ceilings and fiscal management.” It recommended the acceptance of the second and third alternates. Agreement could not be reached within the Administration, which held that to make special concession to Alaska was inconsistent with a policy of equal treatment to all States and that authority to use Federal-aid funds on nonsystem roads or for improving the ferry system was not appropriate. It was also held by some that the 10 percent of construction funds for maintenance was excessive, but perhaps any construction funds unutilized might be used for maintenance, only at a rate declining from all of that amount in the first year to none after 5 years.
Finally when no agreement could be reached within the Administration, Congress brought pressure to produce the report which led the Secretary of Commerce to transmit the report in May 1966 with his recommendations unchanged, but included in the report a letter to him from the Bureau of the Budget explaining its disagreement.
The controversy proved quite academic, however, by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1966, which was enacted 4 months later. The Congress accepted the evidence of need as described in the report by authorizing Federal-aid funds for development roads, and increasing the amount of “construction and maintenance” by $14 million annually for a 5-year period, 1968 through 1972, to be appropriated from general funds, not the Highway Trust Fund. Planning In Urban Areas After 1956
While the 1956 Act ushered in a new era in highway transportation with major emphasis on completing the Interstate System, its effect was but little less on the problems of the urban areas. Funds had been available, even if in relatively small amounts, for expenditure only in urban areas since 1944. Many State highway departments had engaged in the urban transportation studies with the cooperation of the cities. But the States were few indeed that had accepted the role they ultimately must in working with the cities to aid in solving their transportation problems. While many States sought the cities’ advice and cooperation in connection with programs in urban areas, their concern generally (and quite naturally) was more with getting the highway through the city in an acceptable manner than in contributing to a solution of the city’s internal transportation problems. For the next decade the problems of the States in carrying on the Federal-aid program in urban areas were far more severe in the areas of organization and administration than in the technical or even financial areas. But if the States were not prepared to work together with the cities, the cities were no better prepared to join with the States in a full, cooperative manner.
Early in 1957, sensing well the problems that would arise, Pyke Johnson, President of the Automotive Safety Foundation, following the role it often played of getting people with common interests together, arranged to meet with the Executive Secretary of the American Association of State Highway Officials, Alfred E. Johnson, and Patrick Healy, Executive Director of the American Municipal Association, in the Office of the Commissioner of Public Roads, C. D. Curtiss. In short order it was agreed that a top-level committee, seven from each association, would be formed to explore the State-city problems and to act as a catalyst in working toward solutions. Confirming their representatives’ action, AASHO named its President, its Executive Secretary, the Director of Planning of the Bureau of Public Roads and four other key chief administrative officers. The AMA named its President and six other top mayors or city engineers to the committee, known as the AMA–AASHO Committee on Highways. Public Roads provided the committee secretary.
The Grand Avenue Overpass makes a graceful split to avoid the Albuquerque Convention Center and, at the same time, provides space for off-street parking.
The gap between the two groups at the first meeting was clearly evident, although a good rapport was established. One incident illustrates the differences. The AMA group asked the AASHO representatives to recommend that the States each organize an “urban division” to give undivided attention to urban problems, paralleling the secondary roads division each State had set up in response to an earlier provision of the Federal-aid highway legislation. The AASHO group demurred and the proposal was again introduced at the next meeting. But instead of being accepted, it was settled by a statement by Jasper Womack, Chief Highway Engineer of California. Cutting through all the verbiage, he observed that the urban problems had become so widespread in California that he might say that the whole Division of Highways was an urban division, and that there was no way in which one particular unit could deal with all facets of State-city relations, that the whole department must be involved. General acceptance of that view cleared the air and led to a mutual understanding and a truly cooperative spirit that persisted for many years.
The First National Conference on Highways and Urban Development
One of the first activities in which the Committee was engaged was the cosponsoring, along with the Highway Research Board, of the first National Conference on Highways and Urban Development. At that time the Automotive Safety Foundation was supporting the staff activity of the Highway Research Board Committee on Urban Research (later to become the Urban Research Department of the Board under the chairmanship of Pyke Johnson, by then retired from the Automotive Safety Foundation). Through this Committee, the Foundation provided financial support and technical assistance for the Conference.
The AMA–AASHO Committee made sure that key highway and city officials would participate. The HRB Committee arranged for participation by key transit officials, planners, and other professionals and appropriate leaders from the business and academic communities. The Executive Director of AASHO agreed to serve as General Chairman, and ran the Conference with a firm hand. In October 1958 the first National Conference on Highways and Urban Development was held at Sagamore, a conference center operated by Syracuse University.
Had there been any doubt as to the sincerity with which the conferees would go about their task, it was quickly dispelled in the situation in which they found themselves—living, eating, and working together for a full week in the total isolation of the Adirondack Mountains.
In his foreword to the Report, Chairman Johnson says,
The frank discussions of basic issues produced many useful guidelines for developing sound cooperative plans and for expediting action. Recognizing the great interest in this subject throughout the country, the Conference felt that these constructive ideas should be given the widest possible circulation as an aid to the many officials and civic leaders who have the responsibility of moving the highway program and for coordinated, planned urban development but who were not privileged to attend the Sagamore Conference.[20]
In the early stages of the discussions, parochial views were expressed and professional jealousy was sometimes apparent, but after all views were fully aired,
The Conference agreed that the final choice among possible alternatives in highway location and design should be guided by a ‘grand accounting’ of costs and benefits. Advantages and disadvantages of each alternative—in terms respectively of the highway user and the community—should be added up and evaluated, in comparison with the total cost entailed.[21]
Even as of 1958, thoughful highway and city officials found themselves together on the need for a “grand accounting” and on the need for considering “community values.” Probably no one present, however, had any notion of the difficulty of measuring the community costs and benefits.
Agreement on principles was not difficult. Highway officials urged that their departments “should be staffed with personnel experienced in urban problems” and that “State Highway Departments, in cooperation with the local governments, should develop a tentative program of urban highway improvement for a period of at least five years in advance . . .”[22]
This latter step was agreed to by the highway engineers present only after considerable discussion because of the unfortunate experience of some that programs announced in advance led to land speculation and skyrocketing costs of right-of-way acquisition. It was finally accepted as a concession that must be made if the cities were to be able to gear their programs to those of the States.
The State representatives agreed that the departments "should consult with local authorities on a continuing basis in highway planning" and, what was probably far more significant than then realized, that “it would be helpful to send engineers to seminars in city planning.”[23]
On their part, the city officials and planners accepted their responsibility for developing ”tools and plans which can be of inestimable value in planning the urban highway program.”[24] These tools included a land use plan, transportation plan, capital improvement program zoning ordinance, subdivision regulations, and others. It was agreed that some of the purposes such tools could serve were:
Zoning and subdivision controls can help achieve economy in road development and protect the service values of the facilities after they are built . . . City planners need to develop and use factual material to support suggested controls for orderly community development as related to highways. However, the community must stand behind and support these controls to obtain such benefits and economies.[25]
(It is fair to ask whether the planners and elected city officials have even now succeeded or made real effort to meet this responsibility, accepted by their representatives. )
It was noted that
Urban planning can aid in determining the scale and character of the highway program by providing highway officials with estimates of urban growth and development likely to take place in a metropolitan area in the next two decades or more. If new highways are to accomplish their purpose and not become obsolete soon after completion, their planning must take into consideration the patterns of community growth, as well as the urbanizing influence of the highway itself.[26]
The conference concluded on an optimistic note. The conferees, perhaps for the first time, had obtained a good knowledge of the total problem and were resolved to do their agreed upon parts to solve it. The question, of course, remained as to how to impart to other officials and professionals and civic leaders the understanding reached, the principles accepted, and the responsibilities that must be assumed.
The first requirement of dissemination was the publication of a report of the meeting, and this the Automotive Safety Foundation handled in admirable fashion, with the report “Guidelines for Action” receiving wide distribution and general acclaim. More important, however, was the followup to get the guidelines put to use. Because of the high caliber of the conferees and their stature in their own organizations, channels to provide for this followup were available and open. Among the 55 participants were included four highway officials who had served or were to be the heads of their respective State highway departments. Two of the mayors had served or were to serve as presidents of AMA, and several other participants held or were to hold office as presidents of their respective national professional organizations—planners, traffic engineers and public works directors, for example. Their participation in the conference and their endorsement of the findings were important, especially to members of their own groups.
An Action Program
The urban travel habit studies described earlier were by then being carried on in most large cities. Major efforts in research in ongoing studies in Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia, for example, were breaking new ground in techniques for relating transportation demand to land use and developing models for predicting future land use to serve as a basis for plans for future transportation facilities. But the great bulk of the cities in the medium population group were not active in preparing for their future transportation needs.
It was in this atmosphere that the AMA–AASHO Committee continued to work through their parent organizations to stimulate greater effort and a higher degree of coordination between State and local officials. Appearances of speakers at one another’s meetings helped, as did releases describing advances in technology and improved administrative and organizational approaches. It was ultimately concluded by the Committee, however, that a more specific attack must be organized, and at its meeting in Kansas City in January 1962, adopted the “Action Program.”
This program as developed by the Committee called for a series of regional meetings to which all State highway departments and all cities would be invited to send representatives. At these meetings the cooperative planning process would be described, the sources of funds to undertake the studies outlined, and the availability of technical assistance noted. Through the regional engineers of the Bureau of Public Roads, each State in the region was asked to select in advance of the meeting for that region a “pilot city,” generally in the population range of 50,000 to 250,000, for it was felt that most of the larger cities were already engaged in the cooperative process. The pilot city would then serve as an example for officials of other cities in the State, where they might observe how the process was carried out with the hope of their undertaking similar work in their own areas.
The program as developed by the AMA–AASHO Committee was quickly endorsed by their respective parent organizations, and by the National Association of County Officials (NACO) which was invited to join with the AMA and AASHO as a sponsor. The program, known thereafter as the AMA–AASHO–NACO Action Program was launched in May 1962 with the first regional meeting in Chicago. As was the case in all regional meetings, the regional engineer and all division engineers of the Bureau of Public Roads participated by direction of Rex Whitton, then Federal Highway Administrator. The chief administrative officer from each State highway department, along with staff personnel, attended. Mayors or other representatives from many cities were there, along with a number of county officials. Staff members of the Bureau of Public Roads and the American Municipal Association helped organize that and the other conferences. Representatives of the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) took part in this and all other conferences to explain how “701” planning assistance funds[N 1] could be made available to the cities to aid them in meeting their share of the cost of the cooperative endeavor.
The series extended into June 1963 before the entire country was covered. During this period, over 1,500 State and local officials were brought face-to-face with planning, many for the first time. But during the series came the 1962 Federal- Aid Highway Act, which changed somewhat the emphasis of the series of meetings. Instead of encouraging a voluntary effort, the purpose became one of explaining the requirements of Section 9 of the Act, now known as Section 134 of title 23.
There was no change in principle, however, nor in the approach to the problem as a result of the 1962 Act. Prior to that it was emphasized to the participants that while the program was being described by Federal officials, it was “your” program, one developed and officially endorsed by “your” organizations. The Federal role was to describe and help demonstrate how the program could help to give technical assistance and to aid in the funding.
The 1962 Act was not a new congressionally conceived requirement, but rather an endorsement of a process already being proved effective in many areas. The Act simply required its extension to all urban areas of 50,000 or more population. The language of the Act bears this out in the first and last of the three sentences that comprise section 9. The first sentence reads as follows:
It is declared to be in the national interest to encourage and promote the development of transportation systems, embracing various modes of transport, in a manner that will serve the States and local communities effectively and efficiently.
- ↑ Grants to State and local governments for planning coordinated transportation systems authorized by the Housing Act of 1961 (75 Stat 149, 170).
Cincinnati’s 1948 Master Plan included certain specific expressway recommendations. Exhaustive studies were made on this section of I-71 to preserve the historic Lytle Park area. Two S-lane tunnels for ramp traffic plus special lighting, ventilation, and flood and fire protection were all included. These tunnels also provide a base for restoring Lytle Park and the private development of a multimillion dollar apartment complex.
That is exactly why the Action Program had been undertaken. It is exactly what was recommended at Sagamore 4 years earlier.
Then the third sentence reads:
After July 1, 1965 the Secretary shall not approve . . . any program of projects in any urban area of more than 50,000 population unless he finds that such projects are based on a continuing comprehensive transportation planning process carried on cooperatively by the States and local communities in accordance with the objectives stated in this section.
And how to meet that requirement was exactly the procedures that were being described in the regional meetings, although initially the requirement, of course, was not contemplated. At the meetings subsequent to the passage of the 1962 Act, it was pointed out that no Federal planning is involved, nor in fact is any planning required if no projects are to be programed in a given urban area. But if the States did expect to program projects, they could do so only on the basis of planning adequately performed by the States and local communities themselves. This section said it all in a few words. It put congressional muscle behind an ongoing effort—to make a requirement of a program generally being carried on that had been developing effectively but too slowly on a voluntary basis.
The Hershey Conference on Freeways in the Urban Setting
The year 1962 saw also the setting of another benchmark, the Hershey Conference on Freeways in the Urban Setting. By that time the Interstate program had progressed far enough to make generally apparent the impact it could have on urban areas. Criticism was being heard of the appearance of the highway, particularly of its overhead structures, and of the way in which it blended or failed to blend into the neighborhoods it traversed. While it was regarded beforehand as primarily an engineering conference, it had planners as participants and its product was an important planning factor. As expressed in the Foreword of the report:
The Highway program being carried out under the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 constitutes the largest form of federal assistance to urban development. The state highway administrators charged with responsibility for this program, and the federal agencies involved, are aware of the significant role freeways will play in making the city an attractive and desirable place to live and work. This conference was called to solicit positive contributions of the professional groups who share with local, state and federal officials the concern that freeways be of widest possible benefit to the city.[27]
In the Background Statement, it was noted that “Since Sagamore, very substantial progress has been made in cooperative efforts between state highway departments and local officials in the planning of highways and land use in urban areas.” After commenting on specific areas of progress since Sagamore, it was observed that “. . . the concept that urban highway systems should be planned in conjunction with comprehensive community planning is now generally and widely accepted.”[28]
The sponsors of the conference were the Bureau of Public Roads, the Housing and Home Finance Agency and the Automotive Safety Foundation, which again provided financial support and staff help in organizing and reporting upon the conference. They set up a Steering Committee representing:
- The American Institute of Architects
- The American Institute of Planners
- The American Municipal Association
- The American Society of Civil Engineers
- The American Society of Landscape Architects
- The Automotive Safety Foundation
- The Bureau of Public Roads
- The Housing and Home Finance Agency
With the heavy representation of professional groups, the Hershey effort in the freeway design field closely paralleled the earlier successful approach of the National Committee on Urban Transportation in the more general area of overall urban transportation.
Among the professional groups, the architects were most promimently represented, although other professions and professionals of other disciplines who were there as representatives of official agencies provided a good cross section of the technical, as distinguished from the administrative, participants in urban highway development. Unfortunately, the highway field was not well represented.
The early discussions were revealing of strong biases held by some of the participants. Some architects protested that the highway engineers invited them into the act only to provide a “cosmetic” treatment to structures beyond salvation as to appearance. They were critical of highway standards, especially of curvature, which they said demanded unnecessary and undesirable destruction of the fabric of the city. On their part, highway engineers protested that architects commissioned to design structures too often produced costly designs difficult to construct simply to produce unnecessarily refined esthetic effects.
Nevertheless, the conferees by the conclusion of the meeting came together on a series of findings and recommendations. Among the findings, perhaps the most important was:
Freeways cannot be planned independently of the areas through which they pass. The planning concept should extend to the entire sector of the city within the environs of the freeway. The impact of the freeways must be considered in terms not merely of limiting adverse effects but also of achieving positive opportunities for appreciation of value, for development of new land uses, and for changing land use through urban renewal and redevelopment.[29]
Following on the findings came a series of recommendations, sound then and still sound, for unfortunately most of them remain still to be carried out. Among them, three stand out. They were:
There is a fundamental need for teamwork in freeway planning and design. This means teamwork during the preliminary planning phase between the state highway departments who have responsibility for the planning and development of highways, and the municipal agencies responsible for the planning and development of the city. It also means teamwork during the design phase among highway engineers, architects, city planners, landscape architects and other specialists.
Effective participation in design by these professions means participation from the very beginning when the first choices as to location, roadway alignments, right-of-way cross sections and structures are being studied. The full realization of the contribution of the design professions cannot be obtained unless this is done.
More effective programs for informing the public and obtaining community participation in freeway development must be undertaken by state highway departments and local governments. A freeway program cannot obtain in any other way the community concensus necessary to its successful execution. Members of the design professions and other specialists may render valuable assistance by indicating their concurrence with the design and planning objectives presented to the public by the highway officials.[30]
That problems would arise in implementing the findings of the conference evidently was anticipated as noted in recommendation number 7, which recognized the limited talent and experience needed to cope with the problem and recommended educational and inservice training programs. In recommendation 8, it recognized the complexity of the urban problem, and the “. . . imperfect and incomplete knowledge of the desires and needs of families who live in cities and the mechanics of the functioning of urban complexes” and recommended larger and more intensive research into all aspects of urban design and urban living. But perhaps the most fundamental reason that progress was (and still is) difficult is seen in recommendation 9, the import of which is well expressed in its first sentence: “The necessity for compromise among conflicting philosophies and design objectives often must be recognized in urban and freeway design.”[31]
A complex viaduct, crossing several streets and rail lines, serves as an entrance way to Eugene, Oreg. However, the local street system remains intact, and attractive park areas provide neighborhood contacts for pedestrians.
There was little followup of the Hershey Conference. The findings and recommendations were sound and far-reaching, the report was well prepared and widely distributed. But there was no group with muscle to get behind the promotion of the results of Hershey as did the AMA–AASHO Committee in the case of Sagamore. And the professional groups, the predominant participants at Hershey could, even had they tried, have had little impact on the official agencies, State or local, unless they were receptive.
Transition into the “post-’62” period was not difficult. Passage of the Act, of course, brought immediate acceleration of planning effort by the States, for the effective date of the application of the requirements of the Act, July 1, 1965, was less than 3 years from the date of its enactment. The first step in implementing the Act was to spell out the planning requirements that it placed on the States and the local communities. The wording of the Act, that its intent was to encourage the development of long-range plans and programs, made clear that the cooperation between the State highway departments and the local communities must be evidenced by agreement between the highway departments and those in the local communities who had responsibility, the elected officials, for committing those communities to a program. This interpretation left many city planners unhappy, for they had generally been responsible to planning commissions which were often independent of the local elected officials. But they generally had no commitment authority. How the States were to come into agreement with the multitude of local jurisdictions in the larger areas presented real problems, but the means, differing in one way or another, were reached in all areas.
As to the technical requirements for a planning process adequate to meet the intent of the Act, the Bureau of Public Roads turned to the AMA–AASHO Committee as representatives of the State and local communities for advice and assistance. The Committee designated a small task group to work with the Bureau, and after much deliberation and testing among knowledgable people in both associations, a BPE Instructional Memorandum was distributed in March 1963. Because of the thoroughgoing writing and rewriting of this memorandum, it still stands with only minor modifications, as the basic urban transportation planning document. [32] It is perhaps not amiss to recall that it provided specifically that attention be given to social and community value factors—preservation, enhancement, and extension of parks and open space, preservation of historic buildings and sites, avoidance of disruption of neighborhoods, and appearance of the facility both from the viewpoints of its users and its neighbors—all items brought out at the Hershey Conference.
The need for rapid expansion of the planning process across the Nation led to the employment of consultants for the basic data collection and processing in many areas. And it required the rapid formation of policy committees or groups by other names, representing the States and the local communities in each urban area, complicated by the fact that many urban areas extended across State lines. As a result most of the policy direction was by ad hoc groups, hopefully to be superseded by more permanent organizations.
The Second National Conference on Highways and Urban Development
Under these circumstances, the most remarkable achievement in planning ever seen in this country was developed. Along with the development of the machinery to administer the process came striking advances in technology and in data processing equipment that produced a degree of sophistication in planning techniques that perhaps outran the ability to administer it. By 1965 all but a handful of the then 233 urbanized areas had qualified to meet the terms of the Act. It was against this backdrop that the Second National Conference on Highways and Urban Development was held in December 1965 in Williamsburg, Virginia.
The Williamsburg Conference was the direct result of the concern within the AMA–AASHO Committee that plans, then in the formulation stage, be converted into programs and the recognition that the issue of evaluating social and community values and relating transportation plans and programs to them had not been met. At its meeting in November 1964, the Committee agreed to hold a conference to review the state-of-the-art and recommend courses of action for the future and to invite the National Association of County Officials to join the other two groups as an official sponsor. The Federal Highway Administrator expressed strong support for the idea and instructed the Director of Planning of the Bureau of Public Roads to find the necessary funds. This he did, half within his own budget and half from the Automotive Safety Foundation, which once again not only provided financial support but also the near full-time assignment of the Assistant to the President to aid in organizing the conference and producing the report. The objectives of the Conference as spelled out by the sponsors were as follows:
To identify community values, goals, and objectives; and to explore how development of transportation systems can serve to enhance values and aid in reaching goals and objectives.
To evaluate and recommend alternative arrangements for the organization, administration, and financing of the cooperative continuing transportation planning function within multi-jurisdictional areas.
To recommend methods and procedures for converting cooperatively developed plans for interrelated systems of transportation in urban areas into improvement programs of state, county, and municipal governments.[33]
The Conference was particularly significant in the degree to which the official agencies assumed responsibility for its conduct. The Steering Committee comprised the executive directors of the three Associations—A. E. Johnson for AASHO, Patrick Healy for AMA (now National League of Cities) and Bernard Hillenbrand for NACO. The Bureau of Public Roads provided the Chairman of the Steering Committee (and of the Conference itself) in the person of the Director of Planning of BPR and the Committee secretary. ASF provided the Conference secretary. Each executive director presided over one of the three full-day working sessions.
Of the 74 participants, nearly half were there as official designees of the sponsoring association. The others constituted a good cross section of other professionals from the fields of planning, architecture, landscape architecture, research, law and the transportation industries. Concerned Federal agencies were represented by high-level staff members. The directors of the planning studies thought to be the most successful were invited and contributed heavily. Among the highway officials were six who served at one time or another as presidents of AASHO and three others who were heads of their departments. Similar high-level participation came from the other sponsors. The Federal Highway Administration and the Urban Renewal Administrator filled places on the program.
At Williamsburg there were still some parochial views expressed, and fairly sharp differences came out between participants as to the intent and effect of policies or practices of one or another of the agencies represented. But in general the atmosphere from the beginning was one of seeking means to cooperate in developing urban transportation facilities to benefit the whole community, users and nonusers alike.
A full day’s discussion was devoted to the progress of urban transportation planning, emphasizing its technical gains and its financing problems. Another day was devoted to the broad problem of establishing community goals and objectives and determining social values, with successful examples in a few instances described. And another day was devoted to administration, not only of planning and development of plans, but of implementation, both of the transportation programs and of land use controls.
From this review of the state-of-the-art, it could be fairly concluded that tremendous gains in planning techniques had been accomplished and that the importance of close coordination between land use and transportation had been universally accepted. Examples of successful processes embracing both transportation and land use planning over the widest range of population and area boundaries showed that the needed technical processes and administrative machinery could be organized. In these areas it was clearly evident that they generally followed along the lines foreseen as needed at Sagamore. But more than that, the gains in the need for and ability to cooperate among States and their local subdivisions had become equally apparent.
The one area in which little progress had been made, it would seem, was in land use controls. While universally recognized that no transportation system geared to a land use plan could effectively serve land uses unless they developed in adherence to the plan, the assurance of implementation of a land use plan seemed no nearer that at Sagamore. In this area the following measures were proposed to the Conference:
We must define the governmental level at which land-use issues are to be decided.
We must devise positive, rather than negative, controls by which definitive allocations, or even prohibitions, of land use can be made.
We need powers by which public agencies can buy and hold land for future use in accordance with short and long-range development plans legally established and in the public interest.[34]
The Conference concluded that:
Local governments in urban regions should develop workable administrative mechanisms, such as associations of local governments, through which (a) the continuing, coordinated planning process can be carried out in cooperation with Federal and State agencies on a regional basis; and (b) regional plans can be effectively implemented.[35]
In the deliberations and conclusions of the Conference no doubt was left that transportation plans must take into account social and community values, recognizing that as of that time there was no accepted basis for integrating them into the economic analyses customarily made of various alternatives. Again, research was indicated to be needed. But one important point emerged without question—transportation itself is a community value.
And in the conclusions, it was fully accepted that means to bring the decisionmakers into the planning process and to keep the public informed as the planning and programing progressed must be achieved. Words of the recommendation in this area were these:
Urban planning agencies should work actively to achieve (a) public understanding of the planning efforts, and (b) participation of decision-making agencies at appropriate points in the planning process.[36]
While it was accepted that citizens should be kept advised of the planning as it progressed, the conferees evidently saw no reason to bring the citizens into the decisionmaking process, accepting that it was to make decisions that the local officials were elected.
The Williamsburg Report, like its predecessors, was an excellent statement of sound accomplishment and mutual understanding and was likewise given wide distribution. But it carried a stronger official endorsement than any that went before. It was an officially sponsored Conference, and that alone gave it more than usual stature. Beyond that the sponsoring associations made a point of urging their members to be guided by it. The executive director of AASHO noted in his letter transmitting copies of the report to the chief administrative officers of the member departments that “We hope that you will take advantage of reviewing this Report to indoctrinate your Department on the importance of our urban responsibilities and the magnitude of our urban challenges . . .” The Federal Highway Administrator in transmitting copies of the report to the Bureau’s field organization stated that:
The Williamsburg Resolves, buttressed by the accom-panying text of the report, display an impressive area of agreement among the representatives of the several levels of government and the professionals of the different disciplines . . . By this memorandum I am placing the Bureau unequivocally in support of the principles enunciated in this report, and I shall expect all our offices to be guided by them.
Problems of Implementing the Conference Recommendations
It has been said that the Williamsburg Conference marked the high-water mark of urban transportation planning. Without judging the merits of this view, it did mark the high point in efforts of the professionals and associations of officials to join together in a common approach to the problems they had by then fully agreed were mutual. It highlighted a “decade of cooperation.” Following that there seems to have been a decline in real cooperation, and competitive forces both within and without the transportation area increasingly became evident. Concern over the environment rose sharply, much of it quite proper, and the general wave of dissent that swept the country was felt in the urban transportation area no less than in many others. Citizens groups discovered their ability to stop officially approved programs, even if unable themselves to implement or even to suggest alternatives. Individual and neighborhood desires took precedence over programs for the wider benefit of larger areas. Self-interest groups took advantage of the general unrest or uneasiness.
The marriage of the freeway location and landscape to the Mission Bay Park in California serves multiple functions, including a spectular view for the developing residential area.
Yet, with all this, most of the concern being felt and the demands being heard in the decade after Williamsburg were for the very things that professionals and officials had been seeking for many years.
Relating highways to the environment was accepted as an important factor in highway location in Toll Roads and Free Roads in 1939. It was accepted, in a variety of wordings, in each of the conferences and various official documents since that time.
The necessity for relating transportation to land use was likewise acknowledged at every turn. What is now the Interstate System was laid out on that basis in the early 1940’s.
That State and local officials must cooperate in planning and programing urban systems was noted regularly, with particular emphasis at Sagamore and Williamsburg, by the National Committee on Urban Transportation and the AMA–AASHO Committee, and of course, it was made a requirement by the 1962 Act. The need for coordinating programs for the different modes of transportation was spelled out in Toll Roads and Free Roads and in Interregional Highways, was recommended at every conference, and likewise was made a requirement in planning in the 1962 Act.
Much of the initiative in all this was taken by highway officials, but they received willing cooperation from the associations of city and county officials and the support of professional and public agencies outside the official circles. Notably, the Automotive Safety Foundation, supported by the so-called highway industry, provided financial support for the three major conferences as well as for many research and promotional activities in the broad areas of improving urban transportation and enlisted public support for sound programs.
The need for keeping the public informed was recognized at Sagamore, and at Williamsburg the conferees urged greater citizen participation in developing plans and programs.
Yet, 10 years after Williamsburg, transportation problems in many urban areas are no nearer solution then in 1965. In fact, unrestrained development in a large number of urban areas, without corresponding improvements in the total transportation systems, have made their solutions even more remote. In retrospect a number of reasons can be seen why the urban transportation planning effort leveled off or even slipped backward, only having to be revised later and broadened by direction at the national level by both the legislative and executive branches. The effect of any one of the several reasons can hardly be segregated because of their interrelationship both in nature and over time. Each contributed to keeping planning and the use of planning data in either policy or programing pretty much off balance, even though, in tracing the impact of any one reason separately, might not seem to indicate that it alone should have been unduly influential.
Funding had to be a major factor in the difficulty of continuing the effectiveness of planning in the urban areas. The data collection required for the initial phases of the urban transportation process (the “3C” process), called for in all urbanized areas by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962, was costly, exhausting any 1½ percent funds not required for other planning functions, and in many States, requiring considerable “over matching” by the States. While the costs of the continuing phases were far less on an annual basis, they were substantial. The development of simulation models and the computer program packages to implement them required only keeping basic data current by sampling methods and not complete re-surveys, but even that was not inexpensive. Funding of the urban studies was also hurt by the decrease in “701” planning assistance funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Under earlier policies of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, “701” funds available for general urban planning were directed heavily to aid the cities to carry on their shares of the cooperative process. With the establishment of HUD, the policies changed, and emphasis on long-range physical planning shifted to short-range socially oriented planning, thus, placing virtually the entire burden of Federal participation not only in transportation planning, but in general land use planning as well, on the Federal Highway Administration. Other demands on planning funds were also increasing, however, particularly to finance the state- wide surveys of highway needs begun by the joint action of the Bureau of Public Roads and the States and placed on a continuing basis by Congress. Other new programs imposed more and more responsibility on the process as the Congress underlined the essentiality of planning data to serve as a basis of State and urban programs. In 1968 the TOPICS program required that projects must be based on the “3C” process, as did the fringe parking program also authorized by the 1968 Act. The process must provide the basis for the selection of the Federal-Aid Urban System authorized by the 1970 Act, and aid to bus public transportation could be provided only if the routes and special urban high density traffic program, authorized in 1973, were on routes approved by the “3C” process. While not specifically related to the “3C” process, amendment of the basic provisions of the 1934 Hayden-Cartwright Act expanded the area eligible for use of the iy 2 percent funds by adding a phrase to permit their use for planning of local public transportation systems, which under the earlier language also included planning for their financing.
While such expressions of confidence in the planning process developed by voluntary cooperative effort two decades earlier were heartening, the imposition of these and other added functions made the effective conduct not only of the added responsibilities but of the more basic requirements of statewide planning increasingly difficult simply because of inadequacy of funding. It was not until 1973, however, that Congress increased the 1½ percent limitation on Federal participation in planning by authorizing an additional ½ percent to aid transportation planning in metropolitan areas. Apportioned on the basis of urbanized area population and required to be matched by the States, the funds must be “passed through” by the States “. . . to the metropolitan planning organizations designated by the State as responsible for carrying [on the “3C” process].” By this authorization, additional funds were made available for metropolitan transportation planning, but still under the general responsibility of the States, not turned over carte blanche to the metropolitan areas. Attempts by those most concerned with planning over the previous years to increase the 1½ percent funds, never advanced to Congress by the Bureau, were finally successful only after their inadequacy became painfully apparent.
Coupled with inadequacies of funds was the lack of real concern for planning, especially in the urban areas, by some States, and similar indifference on the part of many cities. Changes in administration in local governments brought into office new officials who were not even aware of the cooperative process in which their jurisdictions were involved by formal agreement. Many State highway departments were not adequately staffed with professionals from disciplines other than engineering to conduct the urban planning process. Over one-third of the States resorted to consultants to complete the initial phases of the planning process in order to meet the July 1, 1965, deadline set by Congress in the 1962 Act. Having thus met the requirement to permit programing of projects in the urbanized areas, their interest nagged, and without staff to keep data and analysis current, the product of the planning became less and less adequate as a basis for programing.
Not to overemphasize the negative, a majority of the States, especially those with the largest cities, maintained and even strengthened their interest, and in cooperation with the Bureau of Public Roads, universities, and other agencies, advanced the technology of planning to a highly sophisticated level, so much so that the process may well have outrun the ability to utilize it fully in administration. But despite the advances in some States, a sufficient number allowed the process to become dormant or lag so badly as to bring into question whether the requirement that the process be continuing cooperative, and comprehensive, one or another or all three, were being met. Ultimately the Federal Highway Administration found it necessary to require that the Division Engineer in each State certify annually that the planning process in each urbanzied area satisfactorily met the requirement of the 1962 Act as a basis for programing projects in those areas.
Some of the problems with respect to the planning process were the result of its success. It became widely accepted throughout all the States, as its merits were proved under actual test. It became accepted in other countries as well, as their planners observed its operation in this country, or as American consultants made their experiences available to them. Some countries literally adopted the entire process bodily. But in the enthusiasm of those who developed and were applying the process so successfully, it perhaps became oversold. It had its limitations. The process as it developed could ascertain the relationship between transportation and land use and forecast the number of trips in an area, their origins and destinations, the mode of travel that would be used. It could “assign” trips to specific routes and estimate traffic volumes with accuracy. But it was developed on a metropolitan or “coarse-grained” scale. The sampling techniques and the simulation models were fully adequate to estimate future traffic volumes on freeways and major arterial streets, for example, or on a heavily traveled transit line, but they were not sufficiently “fine-grained” to permit showing turning movements at a particular intersection or volumes on particular ramps of an interchange. It was perfectly proper and highly desirable for the Congress, in authorizing the TOPICS program,[N 1] for example, to require that projects be based on the planning process. But what the Congress perhaps did not appreciate, and what many States certainly did not, was that the process as then in operation was not the “be-all” and “end-all” in planning;, and could not provide data needed to plan minor street improvements or traffic signal timing as TOPICS required. Some State highway officials found it hard to accept that the process, so expensively organized and conducted, could not supply the simple facts needed for TOPICS. All that was needed, of course, was to expand the “3C” process to treat local situations, using tested, more conventional methods, and this was done. But the requirement to do so resulted in some disenchantment, temporarily at least, in some areas.
- ↑ Section 135 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968 made the Traffic Operations Program for Improvement of Capacity and Safety (TOPICS) a continuing program.
The Future of Urban Transportation Planning
The Bureau of Public Roads and others, fully aware of the limitations of the process, once the basic job of getting planning on an acceptable basis in all urbanized areas was substantially accomplished, began exploring methods of adapting the simulations procedure to broader use. Looking toward the finer-grained traffic data needs, a “micro-assignment” procedure was developed to meet the needs of localized traffic analyses, and in the other direction, intensive effort by Bureau staff led to the development of a multiregional approach to urban transportation problems at policy, rather than planning and programing, levels.
This latter approach called TRANS, an acronym for Transportation Resources Allocation Study, made it possible to examine the effect on transportation needs of alternate land development policies and the dollar costs and benefits, direct and indirect, of various transportation alternatives to the extent pertinent factors could be expressed in monetary terms. In addition, it provided means for including “noncostable” items such as the impact of the alternatives on social and environmental areas to the extent their effects can be measured, but only in nonmonetary terms. The model is applicable to all urban areas aggregated on a national scale, or on a statewide scale, or down to the larger metropolitan areas. Its purpose, as described by two of the Bureau staff most deeply involved in its development, was:
The determination of long-range government priorities, policies, and programs is a complex process which blends hard politics with occasional naive idealism, trades off narrow interests against the common good . . . It remains the responsibility of transportation planners . . . to maintain a firm philosophical and functional commitment to provide policy formulators and decision-makers with a continuous flow of information and an objective capability for digesting and evaluating this information. The TRANS-urban approach must be viewed in this context. It is not an automatic policy making tool. It is intended solely as a mechanism that can provide rational information that was perhaps not previously available.[37]
This concise statement applies not only to the mechanical process that was developed. It defines the role of the planner as one in which he must supply usable objective data to the political leader, the decisionmaker, and it calls on the decisionmaker to use it.
The planning process has indeed become a highly sophisticated process, developed by dedicated professionals drawn from a variety of disciplines whose product was made possible only by computer technology. Applicable to all modes and to general planning as well, its development was financed virtually entirely by road-user funds. It is unequaled in any other planning area. Yet it can be effective only to the extent policymakers understand its products and accept the objective data it presents as a basis for their decisions.
Beyond the question of the mechanics or general applicability of the planning processin engineering analyses, the difficulty in gaining public acceptance of plans and programs developed from planning facts seems to cast doubts on the process itself. Planning and development of a freeway system must be at metropolitan scale, and the metropolitan system must be accepted as an integral element of a statewide highway network. A rapid transit line and even major arterial route development are facilities of regional importance and must be planned and developed at that scale. Yet their impact, both desirable and undesirable, is felt at a very local scale. While residents of a neighborhood or even a larger community may strongly favor a freeway system, they object to its location in their own neighborhood or community, and even rail rapid transit proposals share this same problem. Differences between local and regional goals can hardly be unexpected, but the highway program brought them into sharp focus. The highway program also gave those with ecology concerns, often at all costs, an opportunity to focus their efforts. The only answer seemed to be to bring the citizens more directly into the planning process.
The Congress first recognized the need to give citizens the opportunity to comment on proposed highway projects in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, but for diametrically the opposite reason for what is now fundamental to project acceptance. At that time citizens and travel-oriented businesses in small towns feared the loss of business if the Interstate System, with its required control of access and widely spaced interchanges, were to bypass their communities. Responding to these groups, the 1956 Act, under section 116, declared that as a matter of policy:
Any State highway department which submits plans for a Federal-aid highway project involving the bypassing of, or going through, any city, town, or village, either incorporated or unincorporated, shall certify to the Com- missioner of Public Roads that it has had public hearings, or has afforded the opportunity for such hearings, and has considered the economic effects of such a location. Provided, that if such hearings have been held, a copy of the transcript of said hearings shall be submitted to the Commissioner of Public Roads, together with the certification.
From this start grew the public hearing process, with all its inadequacies, dissatisfactions and problems. As it developed, it may have caused more problems than it solved, and it is still a troubled area. Early, most highway departments looked on the public hearing as an unfortunate added step in project approval and went into the hearing intent on defending their decisions against criticism. Later, as the requirements were extended ultimately to cover nearly all Federal-aid projects, States increasingly attempted to make the hearing a constructive step, often in difficult cases employing consultants to develop various alternatives for consideration at the hearing, although only recently recognizing that one alternative should be to do nothing. The assumption that a project was to be built and that citizen suggestions might help decide which alternative was most suitable met with little favor among groups which wanted only one thing—to be left alone. Criticism developed over the tendency to make only engineering and economic analyses (after all, the law only required consideration of economic effects) and ignored social and environmental factors. As time went on, the requirement for two public hearings, a location hearing and a design hearing, was introduced, and in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, the Congress, responding to mounting dissatisfaction with the highway program in many urban areas, amended the language of the 1956 Act by striking out the words “economic effects of such a location” and substituting the words “economic and social effects of such a location, its impact on the environment, and its consistency with the goals and objectives of such urban planning as has been promulgated by the community.” This change clearly brought the hearing process directly into the planning area, where previously it had been regarded generally as an engineering function. It imposed a further load on the “3C” process, but it moved the process to closer liaison with engineering.
This change still did not suffice as a means of reconciling divergent views as to the highway program, and in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1970, the Congress further required that the certification by the State regarding the public hearing must be accompanied by a report of the consideration given to the economic, social, and environmental effects of any of the alternatives that were brought up at the hearing. It must be assumed that representations had been made to the Congress that the States paid insufficient attention to suggestions made at the hearings.
During the consideration of this amendment, the Committee on Public Works explored with the Federal Highway Administration the desirability of requiring a third public hearing, preceding the location and design hearing probably to be called the planning hearing, at which more basic questions would be discussed and hopefully an agreement reached that a highway improvement in the particular corridor or area indeed was necessary. Concern over what such a hearing process would involve led to the counter suggestion that FHWA would devise a strategy by which there could be meaningful input by citizens into the planning process. To this the Committee agreed and the requirement for the third hearing was not pursued.
Thereupon it became incumbent on FHWA to develop guidelines to bring this about. Examination of hearing transcripts and of other means some States had used to reach agreement with local groups and communities showed many examples (ranging from modification of Interstate project design to not having a village street), of changes stemming from the hearing process. Conferences, organized by the Highway Research Board and other agencies, reviewed examples of effective citizen participation and of the problems of achieving it. Primarily, it had to be concluded, citizen participation was most effective when it was handled on a person-to-person basis, a highly subjective approach. The problem FHWA faced was trying to institutionalize such a subjective procedure.
The result was that the first step involved little more than advising the State that the citizens must be brought into the planning process, and gave them examples of some successful devices to do that.
This first step was followed by a more formal requirement in 1973 responding to section 136 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1970 under which each State was called upon to develop an “Action Plan” to ensure that proposed highway projects are based upon a balancing of the adverse economic, social, and environmental effects and the cost of eliminating or minimizing such effects against the need for fast, safe, and efficient transportation. The guidelines and the State Action Plans are discussed in detail in Chapter 5.
I-95 runs beneath this reflecting pool two blocks west of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Air-right Federal buildings at each end of the tunnel enclose the ventilation equipment. The tunnel concept permitted the new Mall plan to retain this pool and the proposed Ceremonial Drive along its western edge.
Obviously this section of the 1970 Act put public hearings deeply into the planning process. As the Action Plans were being received in the Federal Highway Administration during 1974, the manner in which the States responded to the congressional intent would become apparent.
It has been noted repeatedly in this chapter that most urban transportation planning, and a considerable amount of general urban planning, had been financed with highway funds. It was also noted that prior to the establishment of the Department of Housing and Urban Development the “701” funds that had been heavily directed to aiding the cities in their cooperation with the States, primarily for developing the land use plan, were redirected more toward short-range social goals. When aid to public transportation was initiated by Congress, administration of it was placed in the Urban Transportation Administration then under HUD. No UTA funds were available for the sort of planning carried out under the “3C” process that might be called transportation system planning, although funds could be used for project planning, the type of work called project design in highway terms and which can be financed from construction funds. Projects could not be approved, however, unless they were found to be consistent with an acceptable city or metropolitan plan such as had been largely financed under the “701” funds. This finding, or certification of acceptability, was made within HUD but not within the UTA. Subsequently, when the Department of Transportation was established in 1967 and UMTA was brought in July 1, 1968, project approval became the responsibility of DOT, yet certification of acceptability under the approved city or metropolitan plan still remained in HUD and any lingering hope of “701” fund assistance in system planning disappeared. Responsibility for administering a rapidly and substantially expanding public transportation improvement program fell upon an Administration badly understaffed, with no field organization and no funds for system planning.
To the Federal Highway Administration, it was apparent that the same basic data, the same land use transportation relationships, the same modal-split models applicable to highway planning were either directly applicable or easily adaptable to transit planning. It offered the facilities of the established “3C“ processes in every urbanized area to aid transit system planning and its field offices and its division planning engineers to act as a field arm of UMTA. These efforts met with only mild success, for over the years transit interests had regarded “their mode” as competitive with highways, and starved for Federal aid in comparison with the affluence of the highway mode with what they saw as heavy Federal “subsidies,” particularly the 90–10 Interstate program. Conversion of thinking of modes as competitive rather than as complementary and of administration as antagonistic rather than cooperative was not easy, but gradually was accomplished with strong urging on the part of both FHWA and UMTA Administrators, Turner and Villarreal. Instructions and memorandums signed by both Administrators were issued, joint research projects set up, joint committees organized, and actual exchanges of personnel instituted. During this process, UMTA’s basic legislation was modified to permit use of funds in a manner similar to the 1½ percent planning funds, and the administrative budget increased to allow at least the beginnings of a field organization. A full partnership in attacking urban transportation problems had evolved, and at least in one area the purpose of assembling Federal transportation responsibilities under one roof was being realized. A somewhat similar situation existed in the Federal Aviation Administration.
With the growing cooperation evident at the Washington level, the Department of Transportation began extending the policy to the field. In 1970 a memorandum from the Federal Highway Administrator to the Secretary of Transportation recommended a program to be tried in three regions, which by then had been made coextensive for all Administrations, in developing the planning program. Under this experiment, approval of the planning program in any of the three areas, FHWA, UMTA, and FAA, would be approved by the regional modal administrator only when all three were correlated. Regional representatives of each Administration would meet to consider the programs advanced for approval by the State or local jurisdictions, and if necessary discuss them further with their counterparts, to assure that the individual programs were complementary and not overlapping. Hopefully a single planning agency, such as the one developed cooperatively to meet the requirements of the “3C” process, would carry on most if not all the transportation planning up to about project design stage (to use highway terms), with the Federal share of the cost apportioned appropriately among the three Administrations.
The trial program was to extend over a period of a year, but within months after its initiation the Secretary ordered it to be extended to all regions and made a permanent procedure. Thus at least in transportation planning, coordination was achieved on paper, and increasingly in practice. By 1973 the procedure had become known as the Unified Work Program and all planning under the agreement must be performed by a single planning agency. The policy established by Congress in 1962 applicable to the highway program had now, by decision of the executive branch, been made applicable to all modes.
In 40 years planning, not even called that in the beginning because of prejudice against the word, has advanced from highway improvement planning to broad, sophisticated transportation planning, advancing in its theory and techniques even more than the technology of any of the modes it plans. Unified at State and local level by requirements of the Congress and Federal executive departments and expanded in scope by acts of Congress as new demands appeared, it is a powerful tool in metropolitan planning, not only in transportation, but in general planning as well. Congress has forced the disparate transportation elements in metropolitan planning to come together at local level. It has provided for coordination of modal administrations within the executive branch.
But much remains to be done at the metropolitan level in planning transportation and land uses as interrelated elements if the overall plan is to be an accomplished fact. Local and metropolitan transportation policies can be based on sound planning, even though currently there is little assurance that adequate land use controls or transportation programs will necessarily ensure that transportation and land use, however carefully planned, will achieve or retain balance. States increasingly are coordinating transportation planning and programing through departments of transportation, but only a few are relating them to approved statewide land use or development plans or even policies. At the Federal level there is no national development plan or policy to which a transportation plan or policy can be related. Indeed, much remains to be done.
REFERENCES
- ↑ History and Development of Road Building in the United States, address by T. H. MacDonald before the Annual Convention of the Amercian Society of Civil Engineers, pp. 44–45.
- ↑ Id., pp. 47, 48.
- ↑ H. Doc. 272, 76th Cong., 1st Sess.
- ↑ H. Doc. 379, 78th Cong., 2d Sess., Message from the President to the Congress, p. III.
- ↑ Id., pp. 62, 64.
- ↑ Id., p. 66.
- ↑ Id., pp. 4, 5.
- ↑ Id., p. 3.
- ↑ Id., p. 87.
- ↑ Id., p. iv.
- ↑ What is This Thing Called Planning?, address by H. S. Fairbank before the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Association of State Highway Officials, Miami, Dec. 8, 1947, pp. 6, 7.
- ↑ National Committee on Urban Transportation, Better Transportation for Your City (Public Administration Service, 1958) p. XI.
- ↑ Id.
- ↑ H. Doc. 249, 81st Cong., 1st Sess.
- ↑ H. Doc. 139, 84th Cong., 1st Sess.
- ↑ H. Doc. 120, 84th Cong., 1st Sess.
- ↑ H. Doc. 106, 85th Cong., 1st Sess.; H. Doc. 344, 85th Cong., 2d Sess.; H. Doc. 91, 86th Cong., 1st Sess.; H. Doc. 355, 86th Cong., 2d Sess.; H. Doc. 54, 87th Cong., 1st Sess.; H. Doc. 72, 87th Cong., 1st Sess.; H. Doc. 124, 89th Cong., 2d Sess.
- ↑ House Comm. on Public Works, 1968 National Highway Needs Report, 90th Cong., 2d Sess. (Comm. Print 90-22).
- ↑ Transit and Federal Highways, address by E. H. Holmes before the Engineers Club of St. Louis, Apr. 23, 1964, presented on behalf of Federal Highway Administrator Rex M. Whitton.
- ↑ The Sagamore Conference on Highways and Urban Development Report, (Syracuse University), Oct. 5–9, 1958, Forward.
- ↑ Id., p. 9.
- ↑ Id., p. 14.
- ↑ Id., p. 14.
- ↑ Id., p. 14.
- ↑ Id., p. 15.
- ↑ Id., p. 15.
- ↑ The Hershey Conference on Freeways in the Urban Setting Report, (Automotive Safety Foundation), Hershey, Pa., June 1962, Foreward.
- ↑ Id., Background.
- ↑ Id., Findings.
- ↑ Id., Recommendations.
- ↑ Id., Recommendations.
- ↑ FHWA Federal-Aid Highway Program Manual, Vol. 4, Ch. 4, Sec. 2.
- ↑ Highways and Urban Development, Report on the Second National Conference, Williamsburg, Va., Dec. 12–16, 1965, p. ii.
- ↑ Id., p. 33.
- ↑ Id., p. v.
- ↑ Id., p. v.
- ↑ An Approach to Multi-Regional Urban Transportation Policy Planning, a paper presented before the Highway Research Board by H. Kassoff and D. S. Gendell, Jan. 1971.