generally with widely spaced entrance and exit points, would not accommodate the predominant short trips, and that the States would have to provide duplicate facilities or at least continue to maintain the existing ones. It was further reasoned that toll collection could not fit well into the urban scene, and there lay at least half the cost and far more than half the problem of the Interstate program. It was reasoned that tolls simply added to user cost and that a free system in the long run would be cheaper and more effective. And it was also reasoned that some States, as a matter of policy, did not favor toll financing (California as the prime example) , and it would be unfair to have a national system part toll and part free. The collecting and pooling of tolls on a national basis for partial support of the system, even though so doing would result in a very direct user charge, was not seriously considered. Thus, Recommendation No. 1 of the 1954 report was that “The present law forbidding the collection of tolls on highways constructed with Federal-aid funds should be continued.”
Recommendation No. 2, however, offered somewhat of a compromise in allowing the inclusion of toll roads in the Interstate System provided adequate roads of another Federal-aid system allowed for continuous travel without traversing the toll sections.
This provision recognized the ridiculous situation that would result if a State must parallel an existing toll road with another road built to Interstate standards in order to provide a complete freeway system. Yet it did provide for continuity of travel on free Federal-aid roads should the traveler make that his choice. Adoption of this recommendation moreover would remove the ambiguity resulting from question as to whether the law prohibited the collection of tolls on any “highway” to which Federal-aid funds were applied, or only to specific projects on such a highway.
At any rate the report was extremely timely. The second toll road era had been in a boom period, and might well have continued were it not for congressional action to greatly increase the Interstate program. With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, the Interstate program was almost on dead center. Highway administrators could hardly program projects on sections where a toll road was under construction, nor could toll road authorities do so if there were a prospect of approval of a major increase in Interstate funding by Congress.
What the Congress faced in meeting the challenge was conveyed in the second study required by the 1954 Act, Needs of the Highway Systems, 1955–84, which was transmitted March 25, 1955.[1]
The Post Office in Chicago, Ill., was built several years before, but the city plan called for a highway to run through the building. The highway, open to traffic in 1956, completes the plan.
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- ↑ H. Doc. 120, 84th Cong., 1st Sess.
