Although the map of the original six routes cannot be found, this map was authenticated in 1951 by Mr. Fairbank as having also been drawn by President Roosevelt and sent to the Bureau in 1938 to indicate the routes on which modern express highways should be built. This map shows three lines east and west and five north and south.
This map showed in striking manner the buildup of traffic near the cities and the relatively low volumes between them. This visual picture was reinforced by results of the origin-destination studies already completed in several States, which showed the small percentage of long trips and how the volumes even on the longer stretched between cities were made up largely of successions of short trips. The small amount of really long distance travel—transcontinental—is shown in the report of the study Toll Roads and Free Roads[1] by a map indicating the origins and destinations of traffic crossing a cordon line running through the States of Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona. Here on all the main routes crossing this line only 300 vehicles in an average day were traveling from the Pacific coast States to the Atlantic seaboard States, indicating that transcontinental travel was almost negligible. Only 20 trips from the west coast reached Florida, a figure interestingly close to a finding of 23 trips that were destined to the west coast from Florida, as shown by a similar cordon on the Florida border. Figures such as these gave early evidence that long distance travel would not be sufficient to justify the financing through tolls of the six suggested routes. But it was surmised that certain sections might be self-liquidating. So the investigation proceeded to ascertain the most desirable location of the six routes from the points of view of attracting travel and feasibility of construction and to estimate their costs and probable toll revenues.
The six routes totaled 14,336 miles in length, divided into 75 sections for estimates of cost and potential revenue. Section lengths ranged from just over 30 miles to one—Spokane, Washington, to Fargo, North Dakota—extending 1,160 miles. Mile-by-mile estimates were made of construction, maintenance, operating and debt service costs, aggregated by sections and matched against estimated toll revenues, assuming that travel by 1960 would be 2.5 times the 1937 figure. The comparison confirmed the early surmise; the revenue for the period 1945 (when the system would be completed) to 1960 equaled less than 40 percent of the cost for the entire system and the report concluded the toll system was not feasible. Yet one section, Jersey City to New Haven, showed revenues equaling 104 percent of the cost and adjoining sections from Washington to Portland, Maine, near enough to the break-even point to indicate feasibility of the entire length. Other feasible sections were found running east from Chicago and in southern California.
While the report’s conclusion was unfavorable to the toll concept, the detailed study led to a finding that a master plan for highways in the United States called for appropriate action by the Federal and State governments for “the construction of 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.” With the “abundant data” supplied by the States from the
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- ↑ H. Doc. 272, 76th Cong., 1st Sess.
