The most elaborate expedition of all was sponsored jointly by the Southern Railroad and the NGRA and cost the railroad over $80,000. It left Alexandria, Virginia, on October 29, 1901, and was on the road for 5 months, traveling 4,037 miles and demonstrating at 18 good roads conventions. Welcoming this train to Lynchburg, U.S. Senator J. W. Daniel of Virginia said:
An itinerant college on wheels has come among us. It brings its professors and its equipment with it. It is known as the ‘good roads train’ of the Southern Railway system. This college does not teach out of books, nor solely by word of mouth. It teaches by the greater power of example. If you will just watch its operation you will see a new good road grow over an old and bad road at the magic touch of titanic machinery, and while an orator talks of road building it will set his words to the music of practical accomplishment.[1]
When the automobile arrived, many miles of rural road were similar to this one along Bishop Creek in California.
A steam roller in operation on a demonstration macadam pavement near Greenville, Tenn., in 1901.
The Pere Marquette Railroad and the Michigan Good Roads Association sponsored a Good Roads Train for the summer of 1902—the only train which did not have at least one of Dodge’s road experts aboard. The last of the Good Roads Trains left St. Paul on the Great Northern Railroad, September 8, 1903, for an expedition through Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, and beyond to the Pacific Coast.
The First National Road Inventory
One of the most ambitious tasks undertaken by the OPRI during Director Dodge’s administration was an inventory of all the roads in the United States outside of the cities. The information for this enumeration was obtained in 1904 from questionnaires sent to the county authorities or from “voluntary correspondents” appointed by the OPRI. The investigators, headed by Assistant Director M. O. Eldridge, went far beyond merely tabulating road mileage. They investigated taxation and sources of revenue, road laws and total expenditures in every county of every State. Road mileage was subdivided according to surface type. The information was so voluminous that over 2 years were required to tabulate it and issue the report, which did not appear until May 1907.[2]
The OPRI study showed that there were 2,151,570 miles of rural public roads in the United States in 1904, plus 1,598 miles of stone-surfaced toll roads.[N 1] Of the public roads, only 153,662 miles had any kind of surfacing.[N 2] The expenditures on roads in 1904 were $79.77 million of which only $2.6 million was contributed by the States in the form of State aid.[5]
- ↑ By comparison, there were 213,904 miles of railroads in the United States in 1904.[3]
- ↑ This mileage was distributed as follows:
Surfacing Type (Miles) Earth Gravel Stone Shells, etc.
Sand-ClayTotal Eastern and
Southeastern
States580,850 24,627 21,240 3,091 629,808 Texas 119,281 167 1,909 52 121,409 Public Land
States1,297,777 83,439 15,473 3,664 1,400,353 1,997,908 108,233 38,622 6,807 2,151,570 In addition to the above, there were 1,101 miles of stone-surfaced toll roads in Pennsylvania and 497 miles of toll roads in Maryland.[4]
Office of Public Roads Achieves Permanent Status
From its beginning in 1893 as the ORI, the Office of Public Road Inquiries had been a temporary organization set up by the Secretary of Agriculture to perform a job mandated by Congress, namely, to collect and disseminate information about good roads. Apparently, Congress did not contemplate originally that this would become a permanent function of the Government, but the work was continued from year to year by a short paragraph in the annual Agriculture appropriation bill. In 1903 and again in 1904
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