before State legislatures and other groups to promote the concept of coordination between highway design and traffic regulation and the need for strict adherences to load limits.
The series of tests culminated in the AASHO Road Test in Illinois where the statistically designed experiment produced the data that permitted the development of performance equations that showed, with great precision, the effect of frequency of application as well as the magnitude of axle loads. Thus, his concept was completely validated and, after his departure from the scene, quantified to permit its application in highway design. It was the product of practical research of fundamental importance, however it may have been defined.
Fairbank accepted the almost invariable success of his efforts with modesty, almost as though he had but a small part in them, so it was unfortunate that he took so deeply to heart what he regarded as a failure, one which in his mind overshadowed all Iris contributions. As he saw it, he failed to stop the proliferation of toll roads in the early 1950’s. Along with Chief MacDonald, he opposed the toll road not simply as a matter of Federal-aid law and policy, but on principle. He wrote and spoke against toll financing, emphasizing that the toll roads with their widely spaced access points offered only limited and specialized service and that the short trips, overwhelming in number, must still be accommodated on the existing or expanded systems. He saw duplication of facilities in individual corridors to accommodate both long and short trips, dual charges for toll road users and revenues going to interest payments rather than to mileage or maintenance of road.
Never wavering on principle, lie could not accept the political reality that the quality of road—the freeway—that he had so long and strongly advocated could not then be produced by “conventional” financing. As he saw it, he went down fighting. But it is ironic that it probably was the rapid proliferation of the toll roads more than any other single factor that convinced the American public that it wanted, and could have, the very thing Fairbank had so long advocated. He did not live to see the near completion of the Interstate System, so he could not know that the battle he thought he’d lost was but a temporary setback, that the magnificent system he had envisioned as much as 40 years earlier would become a reality, and in the minds of many, his monument.
Along the way he received many awards. Almost automatically he received the Bartlett Award and the Crum Award, and when the MacDonald Award was established by AASHO, Fairbank, then in retirement, became the first recipient.
The recognition he would have most appreciated, however, came after his death when the research laboratory at Langley, Virginia, was named in his honor the Herbert S. Fairbank Research Station. It can be hoped that within its bounds there will always be the talent, resources, and time to carry on research with the thoroughness he always imposed on himself in his own work.
An educated man, Fairbank was a lover of literature, a scholar, an engineer, totally honest, dignified, modest, retiring, friendly—all these terms fit. Never married, he lived in Baltimore, in later years with his sister to whom he was devoted, and commuted daily the 40 miles each way to Washington.
He was a genuinely friendly man, but he had few close friends, and he found it difficult to get on casual or familiar terms with his associates. Much as did the British, he referred to people generally by their surnames, and one whom he eventually called by his first name felt honored indeed. Likewise, he was always referred to as Fairbank or Mr. Fairbank, and relatively few felt comfortable in referring to him as Fairbank in his presence. To a few friends outside the Bureau, mostly in Baltimore, he was known as Herb. Yet despite this reserve, he was a better friend to some in need than perhaps they realized.
Totally dedicated to the organization and to his profession, he had few outside interests. Each year he took his vacation (he, like the British, called it his holiday) with his sister, often spending time in Vermont’s Green Mountains and occasionally taking a trip abroad. It
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