The needs study might accept as not needing improvement sections that were barely adequate for current traffic or meeting “tolerable” standards. But when any section was found to be below that level and was recommended for construction, the design was based on what would be required to meet traffic volumes of 20 years beyond the expected date of construction, with all desirable safety and environmental factors included—the “desirable” standard.
What really is done is to establish a “level of service” that would in effect be a measure of the quality of traffic flow—speed, comfort and safety all included. The higher the design standard, the higher the level or quality of service, but also the higher the cost. Thus, the criterion becomes the degree to which the desirable level of service can be attained, limited generally by finances but sometimes, as in urban areas, by physical or environmental factors as well. The level of service to be used as a goal can and, in fact, generally must be the subject of some trade-offs between desirable and tolerable service. That is the way in which “need” should be interpreted in the needs studies. It is the amount of mobility and safety that the public is willing to buy, given the potential traffic volumes, and the costs in money, environmental impact, and nonuser social and economic factors involved. Once the technical and administrative or political leaders concerned have agreed upon the level of service that is appropriate for the routes or systems to be studied under the particular conditions involved, the cost estimate is simply the cost to achieve it. Question as to whether it is to satisfy a “need” or a “desire” disappears, for the target generally lies somewhere in between.
Through the next decade, from the publication of the report for California in 1946 up to the launching of the Interstate program by the 1956 Act, the Foundation assisted 19 States in conducting their needs studies, not all as complete as in California but all using the same format with respect to the request by the State legislature for the study and the committee structure involving both technical and political leaders. Of course in all, dependence for facts fell on the highway planning surveys.
Despite the visible success in the early studies, interest was slow in building up in many States, and the pressures to overcome the immediate problems of the warworn highways were enough to give many States reasons for not worrying about long-range plans or programs. Attention even to keeping the planning data up to date lagged. In this atmosphere Fairbank pressed even harder to bring to the States the importance of planning ahead. In one speech, for example, he closed with these words:
It is a remarkable fact that motor vehicle manufacturers, by a concerted action to improve, and more exactly define the designed capacity of, their vehicles, and through the recent invaluable assistance of the Automotive Safety Foundation, of which they are the principal support, should be taking, as they are, a leading part in bringing about the needed multilateral cooperation toward many of the objectives of highway transportation planning as here defined.
Such cooperation and broad planning is being achieved State by State, one after another. The results that have issued from it in California, the even more gratifying results soon to appear in Michigan are certain to inspire similar effort in many States.
The Public Roads Administration is willing and anxious to take its part. It was for this use, exactly, that the highway planning surveys were conceived; to these ends every item of the recommended outline of needed fact gathering was directed. A recent General Administrative Memorandum (No. 319, issued September 24, 1947) renews our promise of cooperation, and repeats an earlier suggestion of the manner in which information, that can be well assembled only by the highway planning surveys, can be addressed to the ends of highway transportation planning.
The State highway departments cannot, if they would, avoid the responsibility of major contribution to such planning effort when it is undertaken, as surely, soon or late it will be, in every State. The State highway planning surveys will be the expected source of most of the facts required in that planning.
May I, in closing, suggest to the head of each State highway department here attending, that he take a fresh look at his highway planning survey after the approaching holidays ; that, patiently, for it will require patience, he read the full text of General Administrative Memorandum No. 319 ; and, facing toward the west from whence a new wind is blowing, decide for himself, whether he is going to be ready, as the inevitable occasion will require, to fulfill the requirements of this thing called highway transportation planning.[1]
With the steady pressure of surging traffic growth, the continued urging from Washington, and the success of the early needs studies carried on with the aid of the Automotive Safety Foundation, 35 States had followed California’s lead by 1959 in preparing for their future. Not all studies covered all aspects of the problem, other consultants entered the field, and in some States repeat studies were carried out to measure the effectiveness of programs adopted as a result of the original studies or to up date the earlier recommendations in light of unanticipated changes of conditions, notably the rate of traffic growth. With the attention given to the highway needs studies, the use of statewide highway planning data had come into its own in the decade after the war and established highway planning as an essential function of the highway departments.
Urban Transportation Planning
The postwar decade saw wide expansion of the urban transportation planning process that, as noted earlier, emerged in Tulsa and Little Rock in 1944. The methods were unique, untried, and the cost of data collection high. The figure of 10 cents per capita originally estimated proved to be far too low, but even so it represented amounts well beyond any figures that had been thought of as the cost of an urban traffic survey.
Even as the data collection process was new, so too were new analytical procedures required. The origins and destinations of trips for a representative day were recorded in the sample households and expanded on the basis of the sample size to represent the total travel for the entire area. Recognizing that the particular route of travel was determined by the layout of the street network and the capacity and condition of the streets, no attempt was made to trace the actual routes, but rather to show on a map the direct line between origin and destination. With the sample households grouped into zones of similar characteristics, or sometimes simply geographically delimited, all trips between each zone and each other zone were shown by bands of varying widths. These bands
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- ↑ What is This Thing Called Planning?, address by H. S. Fairbank before the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Association of State Highway Officials, Miami, Dec. 8, 1947, pp. 6, 7.
