departments on the enormous annual maintenance cost of correcting the damage caused by the erosion of unprotected slopes and ditches, and got them started on a long-overdue program of erosion control and correction.
The pilot beautification program also spotlighted the inadequacy of the prevailing 60-foot rights-of-way. For hundreds of miles of road, the State had to purchase additional right-of-way or obtain slope easements from property owners to provide room to repair erosion damage and to regrade the cuts and fills with flatter slopes and wider ditches. Only then could grass and protective vegetation be established to prevent future erosion. This experience led to the general adoption of wider rights-of-way for new highways, so that by 1940, 100 feet was practically a standard for main roads.
The Secretary of Agriculture’s regulations for programing the $200 million of emergency road funds authorized by the Hayden-Cartwright Act of 1934 required the States to use not less than 1 percent of their apportionments for the improvement of roadsides. By 1936, 5,000 miles of roadsides had been improved with emergency funds and with Federal aid, and most State highway departments were incorporating improved roadside design in their new projects. The BPR was able to report in 1936:
Provision is being made within State highway department organizations for an improved technical approach to the various roadside problems, and more effective methods of handling the work are being used as experience is accumulated. Only a few years ago highways were completed with little thought of the appearance of the finished roadside, and attempts were made at so-called beautification under conditions already bad and often with overemphasis on some particular kind of planting. Par better results have been produced since roadside improvement has been regarded as an integral part of highway improvement to be provided for in planning rather than as an afterthought following construction.[1]
In recognition of the increasing importance of the roadsides in highway planning, the Bureau of Public Roads established a landscape section in its Washington Office and urged the States to set up similar positions to plan and direct the roadside work.[N 1]
Congress gave a further impetus to roadside improvement in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938 by authorizing landscaping and roadside development with regular Federal-aid funds and also “such sanitary and other facilities as may be deemed reasonably necessary to provide for the suitable accommodation of the public. . .” within the right-of-way or publicly controlled adjacent areas. This encouraged the States to build rest areas along the main highways, a policy that had been pioneered in the early 1930’s by the Ohio Department of Highways.
Erosion control, landscaping and rest areas brought commercial highways and parkways much closer together in the 1930’s but the full merging of the design philosophies behind them was still 30 years away.
- ↑ The landscape planning for the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway was done in 1929 by Wilbur H. Simonson, who came to the Bureau from the Westchester County Parkways. Subsequently, as the BPR’s chief landscape architect, Simonson played a decisive part in the movement for improved roadsides in the United States.
Pittsylvania Wayside Rest Area built in 1935 on Rt. 29 near Alta Vista, Va.
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- ↑ BPR, supra, note 48, p. 11.
