The Federal Highway Act of 1921, by concentrating Federal-aid funds on a limited mileage of the principal highways, had temporarily quieted demands for interstate highways under Federal control.
As congestion increased in the 1930’s, these demands were renewed, and they were not long in reaching Congress. Here, there was talk of authorizing the collection of tolls to finance Federal “super highways” between the principal cities—a possibility that had been considered for some time by the BPR but had been discouraged because of the large volumes of traffic required to support the high cost of such facilities.
Early in 1937, President Roosevelt summoned Chief MacDonald to the White House and handed him a map of the United States on which he had drawn three east–west routes from coast to coast and three routes traversing the country from north to south. The President asked MacDonald to get started at once on a study of the feasibility of constructing the six routes as toll roads.[1]
The basic information for such a far-reaching study was already in the files of the BPR and the State highway departments: the product of the economic and traffic studies begun in 1920. Therefore, when Congress ordered a similar study in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938, the work was already well advanced, and the BPR task force was able to finish the report to Congress by April 1939.
From their national traffic map the BPR analysts selected six transcontinental routes totaling 14,336 miles that would satisfy most of the demand for long-distance travel. After making estimates of traffic, the analysts found that only 3,346 miles—those within the influence of the major cities—would need more than two traffic lanes, and of these, only 547 miles would meet as much as 70 percent of their annual cost from tolls by the year 1960. Only one section of 172 miles, from Philadelphia to New Haven, would break even by that date.
The BPR had shown that toll financing was impractical. Nevertheless, the report pointed out, there was an urgent need for “a special, tentatively defined system of direct interregional highways, with all necessary connections through and around cities, designed to meet the requirements of the national defense in time of war and the needs of a growing peacetime traffic of longer range,” and also a need to upgrade the existing Federal-aid highways and the secondary and feeder roads.[2]
The Bureau selected a 26,700-mile system of main interregional highways which would connect all of the major population centers, and which the report recommended should be built as free public highways on wide rights-of-way, access controlled, and without grade crossings. The report went on to observe that in the past, the major obstacles to building needed highways, especially in urban areas, had been “the inadequacy of available funds and the overpowering legal obstacles that stand in the way of obtaining essential rights-of-way.”[3] Archaic laws in most States limited the lands that could be acquired or taken for highways to the bare essentials of present needs without adequate allowance for future expansion and also limited the States’ rights to deny access to abutting property owners in order to preserve a road’s traffic capacity. These difficulties were compounded by the Government’s policy of denying Federal-aid participation in right-of-way costs and the usual practice of State legislatures of providing for land acquisition in the same acts that authorized construction, so that the land was seldom available when needed.
The report recommended that Congress create a Federal Land Authority to buy and hold lands for interregional highways in advance of need in those States without constitutional authority to do so. Such lands would then be leased to the States when needed on terms that would repay the Government’s investment in 50 years. Finally, in an appendix, the report discussed the possibility of recovering all or a part of the cost of interregional highways by the resale of land acquired in excess of the amount needed for the actual construction and protection of the highways. This proposal was enthusiastically approved by the President who remarked in transmitting the report to Congress:
Under the exercise of the principle of ‘excess-taking’ of land, the Government, which puts up the cost of the highway, buys a wide strip on each side of the highway itself, uses it for the rental of concessions and sells it off over a period of years to home builders and others who wish to live near a main artery of travel. Thus the Government gets the unearned increment and reimburses itself in large part for the building of the road.[4]
This suggestion was condemned in and out of Congress as a socialistic scheme to transfer the cost of providing deluxe highways from those most benefited to the already heavily burdened landowner.
The Bureau of Public Roads’ adverse report took some of the steam out of the toll road movement, but by no means all. In December 1939, under pressure from the toll road people, eight North Atlantic States set up a committee of State highway engineers to make a more comprehensive study of the interregional route from Washington, D.C., to Boston which, the BPR report had admitted, had a marginal possibility of success as a toll road. This committee studied the 405-mile route and estimated that an adequate super highway to handle the traffic would cost $253 million, and recommended that some of the Federal strategic highway funds be used for further studies.[5] This suggestion and the report itself were buried in the gathering mobilization for war.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike
While the BPR was working on the toll road study, the State of Pennsylvania was perfecting its plans for a modern high-speed highway through the Allegheny Mountains on the right-of-way of the abandoned South Penn Railroad. In January 1936, the Legislature requested the State highway department to survey the old railroad route and report on the cost of converting it into a highway. A year later, the department reported that a highway was feasible, but would cost $50 to $60 million, much more than could be financed out of the highway budget in any reasonable period.
The Legislature then created the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission and authorized it to acquire
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- ↑ As related in January 1974 by E. H. Holmes of the BPR, a member of the task force that prepared the Interregional Highway Report.
- ↑ H. Doc. 272, supra, note 51, p. 4.
- ↑ Id., p. 114.
- ↑ Id., pp. VII, VIII.
- ↑ Boston-Washington Super Highway, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 126, Apr. 10, 1941, pp. 550, 524.
