basis gave Congress the facts on which to base its policy decisions. Of course, times were simpler and the program then could be considered almost in isolation. In more recent years urbanization, environmental considerations, competition among modes, and other factors have complicated planning and action, and with the greatly enlarged programs, the stakes are much higher. However, review of the Federal-aid highway acts from about 1968 onward shows clear evidence that the Congress has been responding to outside pressures to an increasing decree and relying less on the product of planning. Perhaps the committees tend to disregard the results of planning, or perhaps planning does not or cannot respond to the accelerated pace of current life. Whatever the reason, planning seems to have played a smaller part in guiding the highway program in the last few years than in earlier decades. While advances were made in planning at the metropolitan level, particularly in the area of intermodal coordination (at the direction of Congress and with added funding for that specific purpose), similar insistence on broad planning as a prelude to national decisionmaking seems to be in abeyance.
It is difficult to know when history should end, as it merges gradually into contemporary life, and when reporting begins. In this chapter, the purpose was to describe how the planning process developed and how the results of the planning aided or led to policy decisions and action programs. But in view of the confusion with respect to both policy and action at the Federal level in the last 5- or 6-year period, and without the damping effect of time to permit viewing recent, almost contemporary, actions in reasonable perspective, it seems presumptuous to try to attach historic significance to recent actions. True, the Congress has had the benefit of the periodic reports it directed to be made, and in the past few years, it has also directed the executive branch to make many special studies and has generally taken some action as a result. But most often these studies applied to special problems of a particular State or area, to proposals advanced by special interest groups, or to fringe or minor aspects of broader programs. While a recitation of the impact on planning of some of these actions is of interest in revealing the course of Federal action, it is simply that—a recitation, not an account of history.
The 1970 Highway Needs Study
The 1970 Highway Needs Keport was transmitted to Congress in January 1970. This report listed, State-by-State, all road and street mileage classified in two ways, by administrative system and by functional systems, the latter as best it could be determined by general criteria in the time available. As expected, the comparison showed reasonably good coincidence between the Federal-Aid Primary System and the system of principal arterials in the rural areas of 113,000 miles so classified, 104,000 miles being on the Federal-Aid Primary System. Of the mileage not on the Primary System, 5,400 miles were on the Federal-Aid Secondary System and 3,600 miles were not on either, indicating the desirability of some re- visions upward of those routes in system hierarchy.
On the other hand, some 21,000 miles of collector routes, at best candidates for secondary status, were on the Federal-Aid Primary System, and 75,000 miles of strictly local routes had been included administratively in a Federal-aid system, 74,400 miles on the Secondary and 600 miles inexplicably on the Primary Systems.
More detailed review of the figures would show the disparity between functional and administrative classification to be far greater in some States than in others—as noted earlier, the rural Federal-Aid Secondary System as a percentage of all rural roads in the State ranged from 6 to 39 percent. This disparity simply resulted from State policies of selecting the most heavily traveled routes not on the Primary System (and some no doubt qualifying for that System) and improving them to high standards. Other States preferred to spread their secondary funds as widely as possible. This situation, 35 years after the first authorization of secondary funds, was a far cry from the role of secondary road construction envisioned by Fairbank and MacDonald when they proposed holding the system to 10 percent of the rural mileage. With no clear support from Congress for a limitation on system mileage, the Bureau of Public Roads adopted a policy of approving most of what the States requested in system additions, holding the additions hopefully to a mileage to give “program latitude” rather than requiring more specific criteria. But after 35 years some hard rethinking appeared to be in order.
Although disparity in rural classification existed, that in the urban areas was far more pronounced, accounted for by the fact that Federal aid in urban areas was still limited to projects on extensions of rural Federal-aid primary or secondary routes. As should be expected, while 32,000 miles of urban arterials were on the Federal-Aid Primary System and 22,000 on the Secondary System, some 40,000 miles were not on either. This situation was the result of the concept of authorizing Federal aid in urban areas only for segments of statewide systems that lay geographically in those areas. Even that concept was a considerable advance from the original total prohibition of any Federal aid within urban areas of over 2,500 population. The Congress had never previously viewed Federal aid as appropriate for improving an arterial system for local urban travel.
The Movement to Support Urban Needs
The Congress by the 1968 Act, responding to continued urging to give greater support to urban needs, authorized a new program, the Urban Area Traffic Operations Improvement Program. This program quickly became known as the TOPICS program, an accronym for Traffic Operations Program to Improve Capacity and Safety. It recognized that extension of the freeway system into urban areas had relieved traffic congestion on many arterials but, by the location and design of interchanges, had imposed heavier volumes on other arterials or city streets on which cities were not prepared to finance improvements. Congress also recognized that generally the traffic operations systems in urban areas were not receiving
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