portation for Tour City by the Public Administration Service in 1958. This guide and the 17 procedural manuals became “best sellers,” for the Public Administration Service and went through several printings. The guide and manuals formed the basis for Action Program of Urban Transportation Planning which is discussed later.
It was during the preparation of the NCUT guide and manuals that the divergent philosophies of urban transportation improvement began to merge. In the Committee’s early deliberations, strong representations were made that the planning effort by the States, then often termed the “Bureau Method,” was too expensive and produced no data for localized traffic engineering improvement. There was considerable sentiment that the Committee take a firm stand in recommending diversion of effort from the long-range to the short-range studies and planning. Finally it was recognized that it would be most unwise to look on the two approaches as competitive and that the city interests should join with the States in total studies, long and short range. This decision solidified the Committee’s attack on the problem, and the product of its work soon brought the Public Roads Administration into the activity as a financial sponsor along with the Automotive Safety Foundation. And upon its completion, the program proposed by the Committee was endorsed by the Bureau of Public Roads, and by the Joint Committee on Highways that had by then been named by the American Municipal Association and the American Association of State Highway Officials. The Bureau also found that “In general, the studies embraced in the program, if included in the statewide highway planning survey of any state . . . are eligible for financing assistance from federal-aid highway funds apportioned to the states. . . .”[1]
Thus, this volunteer effort not only produced technical documents of lasting importance, but sparked a significant gain in Federal-State-local relationships and opened a channel for Federal aid to cities in solving their local transportation problems. And, incidentally, the Committee having completed its work in 1958, voluntarily disbanded, not a common-place occurrence in Washington.
Planning in the Washington Office
The increasing activity in the area of highway needs studies and the urban travel habit surveys placed a considerable burden on the Washington Office of the Bureau of Public Roads. Although a Federal planning engineer was located in each State and in each field region, their responsibilities were primarily administrative. Most of the technical assistance and reviews of the ongoing planning activities in the States came from Washington, especially where innovative methods and pilot projects preceded the more general adoption of new procedures or investigation of new areas. Even so, much effort went into advancing the art of planning, or as later more explicitly defined to satisfy the accounting office, research in the planning method.
The highway needs study procedures offers one example. The accepted procedure in the State studies was to estimate the deficiencies in the highway system route by route as they existed at the time of the survey and as they were expected to appear as traffic continued to grow and roads continued to wear out or become inadequate in capacity. Then the year by year requirements to overcome these deficiencies were accumulated to show the total need by systems or for the entire State.
Even before the highway planning surveys were organized, work was being done under agreement between the Bureau of Public Roads and the Iowa State University on what were called road life studies. This study accepted that just as the average life of human beings, or public utility installations, or railroad ties could be forecast by actuarial methods, so too could the life of road surfaces. Plotting the curve of the actual lives of road surfaces from the time of placement until they were retired from service by reconstruction or for other reasons, including different surface types, would give characteristic curves based on actual experience. In many States bond issue financing provided funds for a large mileage of road to be built in a very short period, all or most of which would have to be rebuilt or otherwise taken from service at some future time. Provision must be made for this replacement cost, and by matching the curve of retirements after, say, 10 years since construction with a curve that had been developed by experience of similar surfaces over, say, a 30-year period, the replacement needs, year by year, could be forecast. This forecast did not reveal which particular sections would be retired, but it would give a reasonable estimate of the total replacement program to be anticipated in any year for financial planning. The success of this approach led to its adoption as a part of the highway planning survey package in all States. Replacement of a road surface on the same location did not retire the whole value of the original investment, however. The right-of-way and probably much of the grading and drainage, still were usable, perhaps depreciated but still an asset. So it was reasoned that a curve of investment life, similar to the road surface’s structural life, could also be viewed on an actuarial basis. While there was, then at least, no statistical relationship between investment in the system and demands upon it as shown by traffic volumes accommodated, it was further reasoned that the depreciated investments in the highway plant should keep pace with traffic growth. This view was fully supported by the facts in the decade of the thirties when the curve of traffic growth and the curve of the value of the depreciated investment did almost exactly coincide. Indeed, it has been reasoned and may well be true that our highway systems in that period came nearer to meeting the demands of the traffic of its time than at any period before or since, for it was in this decade that public works programs were strongly financed as unemployment relief projects to the great benefit of the highway systems. With highway construction virtually stopped during the war, investment had barely recovered to its 1940 level by 1950, while traffic had grown by 50 percent. These curves showed at a glance, by their vertical separation, how far the investment fell below the need—50 percent. And by their horizontal separation, they showed how far behind traffic the investment lagged in years—9 years, at the projected rate, to catch up even to 1950 needs, to say nothing about recovering lost ground.
282
- ↑ Id.
