Page:America's Highways 1776–1976.djvu/157

margin for bond payment.^{[1][N 1]} Undoubtedly, the successful experience of this toll road had much to do with 1941 legislation in Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland and New York creating independent authorities to sell bonds and build toll roads. Similar bills in Missouri, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Wisconsin were defeated by narrow margins.^[3]

The Pennsylvania experience seemed to prove that the motoring public wanted wide, high-speed highways at a much faster rate than they were being provided by the States and was willing to pay a stiff extra charge to obtain them. Nevertheless, the Government persisted in its opposition to toll roads, and on April 14, 1941, President Roosevelt appointed a National Interregional Highway Committee of prominent highway engineers and planners, “to investigate the need for a limited system of national highways to improve the facilities now available for interregional transportation, and to advise the Federal Works Administrator as to the desirable character of such improvements, and the possibility of utilizing some of the manpower and industrial capacity expected to be available at the end of the war.”^[4] Commissioner MacDonald of the PEA, who was also chairman of the new committee, provided it with a working staff of the men who had been most closely identified with traffic research during the two previous decades.

Meanwhile, schemes for national superhighways were being proposed in and out of Congress. In October 1941, the chairman of the Missouri Highway Commission called for a comprehensive plan for a system of postwar limited access highways. The plans for these, he said, should be prepared immediately so that they would be ready when normal times returned.^[5] A bill introduced into Congress in October 1942, would authorize a 25,000-mile network of 14 strategic routes costing $10 billion.^[6] Finally, in July 1943, Congress instructed the Commissioner of Public Roads “to make a survey of the need for a system of express highways throughout the United States” and report his findings to the President and Congress within 6 months.

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1. While the financial experience of the turnpike was good, its accident experience was bad—worse than that of the Pennsylvania highway system as a whole. In less than a year after opening, the Commission imposed a 60 mile per hour speed limit to curb reckless speeding.^[2]

The experience of the Pennsylvania Turnpike seemed to indicate that people wanted high-speed highways and were willing to pay extra for them.

The Interregional Highway Report

Much of the work for the report on express highways requested by Congress had already been done by the PRA and the President’s National Interregional Highway Committee. The PRA task force of experts assigned to work with the Committee analyzed at least six possible combinations of interregional routes to arrive at the recommended “optimum” system of 33,920 miles. This system included 4,470 miles within cities and 29,450 miles of rural highways. It comprised a little over 1 percent of the total street and

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1. Pennsylvania Turnpike Earns $2,600,000, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 127, No. 12, Sept. 18, 1941, p. 398.
2. Transport in War Period Dominates Atlantic States Highway Meeting, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 128, No. 10, Mar. 5, 1942, p. 369.
3. Brief News, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 127, No. 14, Oct. 2, 1941, p. 464.
4. Interregional Highways, H. Doc. 379, 78th Con., 2d Sess., p. III.
5. Programming Highway Construction to Meet Post-Defense Needs, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 127, No. 19, Nov. 6, 1941, p. 649.
6. Nation’s Highway Departments Make Plans to Meet Present, Post War Needs, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 129, No. 15, Oct. 8, 1942, p. 465.