The trail organizations were highly competitive and their efforts were uncoordinated, resulting in numerous overlaps.
For example, 70 percent of one trail overlapped other marked routes and one trail overlapped as many as 11 others. One road carried eight different trail markers for a considerable distance. Many trails had alternate sections, compounding the confusion, and one had alternates following three separate roads, all with the same name. Most routes followed their financial support and it was impossible to integrate many of them into any logical highway system. [1]
The pressure of the trail associations for the improvement of their trails made sensible programing by the State highway departments almost impossible. The situation finally became so bad that in 1924 the American Association of State Highway Officials approved a resolution calling on the Secretary of Agriculture to name a board of BPE and State engineers to formulate a numbering and marking system of interstate character for the principal highways of the United States. In response to this resolution, the Secretary appointed a Joint Board of 21 State highway engineers and 3 BPR engineers under the chairmanship of Chief MacDonald with E. W. James as secretary.
Early in its work the Joint Board decided to confine the numbered routes to actual existing roads in the Federal-aid system, but to disregard the state of improvement of any road as a factor in putting it on the system. The Board pointedly avoided holding public hearings to avoid placing itself in the position of arbiter between competing trails.
The Joint Board sponsored six regional meetings at which each highway department had an opportunity to designate its most important routes and coordinate across State lines with its neighbors. When these recommendations were consolidated on a single map, they added up to a system of 81,096 miles, or 2.8 percent of the total existing road mileage. The Board then went over the State recommendations eliminating routes of doubtful interstate importance and finally arrived at a “skeleton system” of 50,137 miles which it submitted to the individual States for approval.
By this time the work of the Board had begun to attract popular attention and, to use the expression of the president of AASHO, “the Infernal regions began popping.” Every community of any size wanted to be on a numbered route, just as a generation earlier every town thought it a matter of life and death to be on a railroad. Under the influence of local pressure the skeleton system was fleshed out to 75,884 miles. This was the system that was recommended by the Joint Board to the Secretary of Agriculture in its final report and approved by him. The Secretary sent the report to AASHO recommending that the Association “take such necessary steps as might be feasible under their respective State laws to put the plan into operation.”[2]
At its annual meeting in October 1925, AASHO delegated to its Executive Committee authority to make minor changes in the system recommended by the Joint Board ”as appeared necessary or desirable.” Immediately, requests for changes began to come in from the States, most of them inspired by the trail associations. The Executive Board acted on 142 such requests and approved additions which boosted the total system mileage to 96,626 miles. This system was approved by ballot of the States on November 11, 1926, and was immediately put into effect by all the States and marked with the familiar black and white shield markers which for almost 50 years have guided American motorists.
What became of the private trails? They were replaced by one or more U.S. numbered routes and, one by one, the trail associations, their work done, went out of business. However, for years afterward and even today, sections of road in many States continued to be called “Lincoln Highway,” “Yellowstone Trail,” “Dixie Highway,” etc.
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