The highway-user tax derived from the registration of vehicles, in this case a 1905 Cadillac.
The Federal effort to improve rural post roads was rather disappointing since only 13 States participated in the project.
An Experiment in Federal Aid
The growing demand for highway improvement was reflected in the more than 60 bills introduced in the Congress in 1912 providing for some form of Federal aid for this purpose.[1] Activities leading toward development of a plan for nationwide Federal aid for highways first bore fruit in 1912, when Congress, in passing the Post Office Appropriations Act, took two steps: (1) It created an investigating committee to study the feasibility of providing Federal aidfor improving rural post roads, and (2) it appropriated $500,000 to aid the immediate building of such roads.
The Postmaster General and the Secretary of Agriculture were to administer the program jointly, and they were directed to select and improve certain roads for mail delivery. The States and their subdivisions were to pay two-thirds of the cost of the improvements and the Federal Government, one-third. The $500,000 in Federal funds for immediate construction was supplemented with $1.3 million of State and local funds.
Although the funds were provided through the Post Office Appropriation Act, direct responsibility for operating the program was assigned to the Office of Public Roads. For want of a better basis, the funds were apportioned equally among the States, about $10,000 to each. This approach failed miserably. Some States refused outright to participate, some were unable to do so because of constitutional and other limitations, and others simply did not respond to the offer.
Early use of trucks was limited to local industry because of poor road conditions and few interconnecting roads.
The Public Roads officials, together with cooperative State and local officials, then selected projects that they believed to be representative in such characteristics as topography, soil condition, and climate. The first project to be built under this Act extended for about 30 miles from Florence to Waterloo in Lauderdale County, Alabama. A total of 455 miles of road located in the 13 States that elected to take advantage of the program were improved under this arrangement, successfully demonstrating the possibilities of a Federal-State cooperative road improvement program.
The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916
Two years before the landmark Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, revenue for rural roads and bridges had risen from $80 million in 1904 to $240 million, a threefold increase.[N 1] The number of motor vehicles
- ↑ In 1904 the Office of Public Roads began a policy of obtaining road mileage and revenue data at 5-year intervals. In 1904 the data were published in Bulletin No. 32 of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The data for the third such investigation (1914) are presented in HIGHWAY STATISTICS: SUMMARY TO 1965, issued by the Bureau of Public Roads in 1967, which is the general source of the financial and motor vehicle data in this chapter.
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- ↑ C. Hayden, The History of Federal-Aid Highway Legislation (unpublished work in the Federal Highway Administration) p. 4.
