would not lay any additional expense on the States and counties but, rather, would relieve them of the cost of keeping up their heaviest trafficked roads, leaving more of the local funds to spend on the local roads.
With the spring thaw, roads such as this one in Michigan about 1916 annually became impassable because of the mud.
The American Automobile Association took a strong position in favor of Federal aid and against dissipating the Federal funds in driblets over the more than 2 million miles of local roads:
. . . we advocate the main roads to be built first, and those are the two fundamental principles that this Association is working for: that the government should aid, and that the government money should be spent only on the main thoroughfares and should not be dissipated by trying to spend it on 2,000,000 miles of road . . . we believe that this work should not of necessity be done by the government, but that the State highway officials, in cooperation with the government, should agree on the roads, the plans, and the specifications, and on the various features of the contract.[1]
The Evolution of a National Policy on Federal Aid
When the Post Office Appropriation Act of 1912 was passed, it was already apparent to most Congressmen that some form of Federal aid to roads was inevitable. The real questions before Congress were how much the aid should be and the form in which it should be granted. The experimental post road appropriation and the congressional joint committee were measures designed to get some answers to these questions, but in the end, the inevitable Federal-aid bill was hammered out on the anvil of political compromise.
The legislators appointed to the Joint Committee on Federal Aid in the Construction of Post Roads represented all shades of opinion from extreme national road advocates to local road supporters. The Committee held hearings and drew heavily on the files of the State Department and the Office of Public Roads for information on the economic and social importance of roads and how they were administered in the United States and the advanced countries of Europe. They learned, for example, that in the United States the average haul for farm products to market or to the nearest railroad station was 9 miles; and the average cost of hauling over the existing country roads was 21 cents per ton-mile. By comparison, it cost French farmers only 8 cents per ton-mile to haul farm products over their macadam roads. The difference, or 13 cents per ton-mile, was in effect a financial burden laid on American producers and consumers alike by bad roads, a “mud tax” that was costing the country $504 million annually. At 6 percent, this loss represented the interest on $8.4 billion, which, according to some economists, might profitably be spent annually to improve the roads instead of the niggardly $204 million spent in 1912.[2]
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