While both Toll Roads and Free Roads and Interregional Highways, the title of this second major report, were prepared under the direction of H. S. Fairbank by the staff of the Bureau of Public Roads and with the substantial assistance of the State highway departments, there was a significant difference. Toll Roads and Free Roads was a Bureau of Public Roads product; Interregional Highways was the product of the National Interregional Highway Committee and submitted to President Roosevelt as such. He in turn transmitted the report to the Congress to meet its requirement of Commissioner MacDonald.
The composition of the Committee is particularly important. Invited by the President to serve on the Committee (all of whom accepted) were three men from the highway field—Commissioner MacDonald, G. Donald Kennedy from Michigan who was incoming President of the American Association of State Highway Officials, and Charles H. Purcell, State Highway Engineer from California; two were from the city planning field—Harland Bartholemew, prominent city planner from St. Louis and Rexford Guy Tugwell, Chairman of the New York City Planning Commission; rounding out the Committee were Frederic A. Delano, Chairman of the National Resources Planning Board and a political leader, and Bibb Graves, former Governor of Alabama. The Committee elected Mr. MacDonald as chairman, and he in turn appointed Mr. Fairbank as secretary.
The composition of the Committee clearly shows the importance then attached to the city and its problems in developing a framework for national highway development. The Committee met repeatedly, and while the words of Interregional Highways were distinctly Fairbank’s, the principles expounded were those discussed and agreed upon by the Committee and which received its unanimous approval.
This was indeed a comprehensive study, beginning with the meeting of the Committee in June 1941 and extending until the submittal of the report on January 1, 1944. The system finally recommended was selected by the Committee after examination of several other systems, greater or less in mileage, as best meeting the requirements laid down by the President and the Congress. The report was transmitted to the Congress on January 12, 1944, and the designation of the system, identified as the National System of Interstate Highways, was authorized by the Congress in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of that year. After much study and discussion, the routes of the system as proposed by the several States, substantially as recommended by the Committee, were approved by the Federal Works Administrator in August 1947. But it was not until the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 that work on the system began in earnest.
Without doubt Interregional Highways was and remains the most significant document in the history of highways in the United States. Several characteristics of the report make it particularly significant.
First is the composition of the Committee that produced it. The report was the product of highway officials and planners with broad interests working together.
Second, the system was not selected simply on the basis of its traffic usage. It was recognized from the beginning that the purpose of the system was to provide for highway transportation to serve the economic and social needs of the Nation. Systems were devised to serve the Nation’s agricultural production, its mineral production, its forest products, its manufacturing centers and, of course, its population centers and defense establishments. Without the help of computers, all these factors were laboriously shown by shading county by county on maps, or by similar devices, and the different systems “eyeballed” through the areas of heaviest shading or largest circles. It was not until the final choice of the recommended routes was made by the Committee that traffic volumes to be expected were brought into the picture, and then only to be used as a means to estimate costs and relative economic benefits.
Third, the importance of the system within the cities was given much attention, with a major portion of the report devoted to “Locating the Interregional Routes in Urban Areas.” Here principles of route location, still sound today, were proposed and illustrated. A paragraph from this report of 30 years ago is worth quoting. It reads as follows:
In choosing these locations for the arterial routes, however, it should be recognized that the undeveloped lands which lie so favorably for highway purposes also present opportunities equally favorable for other purposes of city planning. Properly preserved and developed, they can become the needed parks and playgrounds for residents of adjacent populated areas. Alternatively, they can be developed as new residential communities in the modern manner, unhampered by previous commitment to the traditional rectangular street plan. It is highly desirable, therefore, that the location and plan of the new highways in these areas shall be developed in harmonious relation with other appropriate uses of the now vacant land. Wherever possible, plans for all uses of the land should be jointly developed and acquisition for all purposes of public uses should proceed simultaneously.[1]
Fourth, the need for coordination with other modes was emphasized with the words “However, it is at the cities . . . that the closest attention should be paid to the possibilities of common location, and also to such location of the highways as will best and most conveniently serve to promote their use in proper coordination with other transportation means.”[2]
Fifth, the Committee recognized clearly the limitations of the system. To quote again,
Obviously, it is not possible by any limited highway system, whatever the relative importance of its constituent routes, to serve all the needs of the Nation’s traffic. Nor is it reasonable to assume that in and near the cities the routes included in such a limited system will if improved, provide a complete solution to the serious problem of city traffic congestion. . . . In this connection the Committee has been restricted in its choice because the President directed it to select an interregional rather than a local system, and to consider national above local needs. . . . it is important, both locally and nationally, to recognize this recommended system . . . as that system and those routes which best and most directly join region with region and major city with major city.[3]
Sixth, the Committee recognized the need for full cooperation at all levels of government (still to be fully attained, it seems) by the words “. . . the particular locations of those routes [must] be agreed upon in common by Federal, State, and municipal authorities who will share the responsibility for arterial high-
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