a year. Even with the stretched-out approach, however, a great deal of manpower was involved. In Ohio, for example, over 600 men were in the field within 2 months after the work got underway, some occupied for a full year and others a shorter time. There probably never was a tabulation of the total number of people employed in the early work, but it seems safe to say that at the height of the field work at least 15,000 men were given employment, almost all from the relief rolls or the ranks of the unemployed. Thus, leaving out the benefits of the planning surveys to highway administration, the work represented a major accomplishment in the constructive expenditure of work relief funds in a period of great distress in the country.
But this sudden acceptance of highway planning had a considerable impact on the Bureau of Public Roads as well, for on it fell the task of aiding the States in launching and supervising the work. The few Bureau people who had worked on the cooperative traffic surveys hardly provided a nucleus from which to start. So the Bureau set up a training program for highway planning supervisors, drawing not only from the Washington staff, but recruiting from the field offices and the forest and park programs as well. The response was good, mostly from the younger and perhaps more imaginative employees, many from graduates of the ongoing Bureau’s junior engineer training program. With word of the training program getting around, States also began sending prospective supervisors to take the training courses. While the number “processed” through the training program was probably never tabulated, what is more important the program marked the creation of a new discipline—highway planning—the scope and importance of which surely could not have been foreseen at that time.
One of the maps prepared as a result of the 1930 western traffic survey.
Thus were launched the highway planning surveys, and simply keeping them on course during their early years was a major concern of the Bureau. Data collection procedures were steadily improved, and the many problems that developed in tabulating, reconciling, and summarizing data were met and solved. But the harder part was in moving from summaries of data to reports and from reports to administrative and policy decisions. It was to this aspect that Fairbank wrote and spoke so frequently in the years before World War II.
Perhaps his most preceptive writing was in the area of taxation, for he foresaw financing as the most critical problem of the future. In the “depression psychology” of the era, in which the official views held that the country had reached its pinnacle of development, that there would be permanent unemployment and our problem would be the equitable distribution of limited resources, neither he nor anyone else could foresee the great upsurge in the economy and even more in highway transportation that in 1956 made relatively easy the financing of the Interstate System—the greatest public works program in history.
Planning the Interstate System
While the States were absorbed in collecting and analyzing highway planning data, and Fairbank particularly saw the need to develop a “climate” in the States that would encourage them to carry on from the easier stage of surveying to the more difficult one of planning, the Bureau of Public Roads almost immediately had need to use the data for planning. Early in 1937 President Roosevelt called Chief MacDonald into his office and handed him a map of the United States on which he (the President) had drawn three lines east and west and three north and south across the country. He reasoned that with the increasing use of the automobile the need for more and better highways for long distance travel would be needed, and suggested that the six routes he had sketched on the map might be built and financed through the collection of tolls. And he asked Chief MacDonald to study the possibility. Again, such a program would not only benefit the motor vehicle user but constitute a desirable public works program to provide employment. It can be said that this map is the lineal ancestor of the Interstate System, truly a document of first importance in highway history.
Returning from the White House, Chief MacDonald handed the map to Mr. Fairbank and asked him to get on with the study. Thus, began the first assembly of detailed information on traffic flow on a national basis, possible only because of the rapid progress by the States on the highway planning surveys. While data were still not available for all States, enough States had progressed far enough to supply the data needed for a reasonable appraisal of the feasibility of the President’s suggestion. As a first step, a traffic flow map of the United States was prepared, finished in January 1938 and later updated to January 1939 and refined as more States could supply data. For the first time a picture of travel on all main routes was available.
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