needed new arteries into the city center. Since the actual accomplishment of such projects will at best require time they should now be planned in order that their eventual courses may not be barred by newly created property.
There is another, and perhaps still more important, reason for avoidance of delay in the carrying out, or at least in the planning, of new transcity arteries and express highways. It is that in the business district itself—in most cities, but particularly the older ones—there is a slow decay that will not be arrested until there is radical revision of the city plan. Such a revision will have to provide the greater space now needed for the unfettered circulation of traffic, and will have to permit a reintegration of facilities for the various forms of transportation—railway terminals, docks, airports and the highway approaches to each—more consistent with their modern relationships. For such a revision of the city plan decision upon the location and character of the new highway facilities here described is a basic necessity. Toward the actual accomplishment of the much needed revision, little else that might be done by Government would be so likely to supply the impetus.
What has been done in recent years in the city of Washington in cutting Constitution Avenue and the new arteries approaching the Union Station through the former mean clutter of narrow streets is indicative of the least that somehow must be done in many of the larger, and especially in the older, cities. When one observes the countless impediments that embarrass the movement of twentieth-century traffic through the eighteenth century streets of some eastern cities one wonders how long it will be, with the assured further increase in traffic, before complete congestion will result.
Because of their urgent need to facilitate highway transportation where it is now most seriously hampered, and because of the impetus that through them may be given to needed changes in the central plan of our cities, the construction of transcity connections of the main rural highways and other express routes into the center of the cities ranks first in the list of highway projects worthy of consideration by the Congress. Possibly no other work that might be done would so profitably provide employment coincident with the centers of present unemployment.
BELT LINES AND BYPASSES
Next to provisions for the safer and more efficient conduct of large traffic streams into and across cities, the new facilities most urgently required are belt-line distribution roads around the larger cities and bypasses around many of the smaller cities and towns.
As previously pointed out, the traffic on a main highway approaching a large city, that will use a bypass route if offered, is a small part of the total. By far the greater part is originated in or destined to points in the city and largely points near its center or customarily reached by traveling through the center.
Bypass routes, therefore, may not be regarded as means for the relief of congestion on the highway-connecting streets of large cities. Further evidence of the correctness of this observation is afforded by plate 51, which shows profiles of the traffic volume on the two alternate connections of U.S. 40 across the city of Columbus, Ohio. From these profiles it will be observed that even if the entire traffic
