have found that an experienced powderman who has once used TNT can hardly be induced to use anything else.”[1]
The massive distribution was substantially completed in 1925 by which time equipment and supplies worth $215 million had been given to the States and the BPR had retained for its own use equipment worth another $7.8 million.[2]
The Defects of the Federal-Aid Program Exposed
The Federal-aid forces suffered serious defections in April 1919, when a group of national road advocates formed the Federal Highway Council.[3] One of the organizers of this group was highly respected Henry G. Shirley, Chief Engineer of the Maryland State Roads Commission and one of the founders of AASHO. The avowed purpose of the Council was to get Congress to set up a system of national highways under Federal control such as that proposed by the Townsend bill. The backing for such a system came principally from the eastern and north central States that had suffered the most from wartime traffic. Most of these States had well-defined, limited State highway systems and strong highway departments; and they had for years concentrated much of their money on main intercity highways which were under the direct control of and maintained by the State. In these States Federal aid had been applied to the through routes with good effect.
The situation was quite different in 17 southern, prairie, and western States in which the counties were still the basic political units for building and maintaining roads. These States had created weak highway departments or commissions to receive and distribute the Federal-aid funds and had given them some powers to approve or disapprove standards, but these departments generally lacked the power to initiate projects and so to place the funds where they were most needed. Even worse, the legislatures of some States had directed that the Federal funds must be subapportioned among the counties according to a formula similar to the Federal-aid formula (⅓ according to area, ⅓ according to population, and ⅓ according to post road mileage). This split the limited amount of the State’s apportionment into fragments, each too small for a satisfactory project, a process that, according to Henry Shirley, would result in these States being “spotted with and not linked by Federally constructed highways.”[4] In one southern State a sparsely populated county got only $4,000 of Federal aid in one year for its portion of the State highway system. At this rate, according to Shirley, it would take 100 years to complete one road across the county even though this road might also be an important link between important cities in adjoining States.
A drawback of the 1916 Federal Air Road Act was that federally aided roads need not have been connected.
Minnesota and Kansas were prohibited by their constitutions from engaging in works of internal improvement, and some southern States were legally unable to incur bonded debt. In these and a number of other States, the counties were required to put up also to pay for maintaining the roads afterward. This policy, according to the director of the American Automobile Association’s Good Roads Board, resulted in giving good “. . . roads in rich counties and in pauperizing poor counties.”[5] Another result was that the completed roads in the poor counties were often poorly maintained and there was little the State highway departments could do about it other than threaten to withhold future Federal-aid funds.
To establish eligibility for Federal aid, the Secretary of Agriculture had required all States to designate State systems of main roads on which the Federal funds would be spent. These systems totaled 214,000 miles, or 8 percent of all U.S. roads. However, for individual States, the system mileage varied from less than 5 percent up to as much as 15 percent of the total existing mileage; and in some of the latter States the systems were so diffuse that it would take years to improve them, and even then they would not provide reasonably direct routes to important places in neighboring States.
Critics of Federal aid also liked to point out that, according to the official reports of the Bureau of Public Roads, three-quarters of the road mileage improved with Federal aid had low- or intermediate-
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- ↑ L. Smith, TNT A Success In Road Work, Public Roads, Vol. 3, No. 31, Nov. 1920, p. 13.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1925, p. 28.
- ↑ Federal Highway Council Formed, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 82, No. 16, Apr. 17, 1919, p. 790.
- ↑ Why Federal Aid Will Not Build A National Highway System, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 84, No. 7, Feb. 12, 1920, p. 336.
- ↑ M. Eldridge, Federal Highway Appropriations, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 86, No. 6, Feb. 10, 1921, p. 272.
