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
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