facturers bought motor trucks and started a motor freight service to bring castings from foundries 20 to 30 miles away. An Akron tire manufacturer found it feasible to deliver to Detroit and Boston by truck, and a new household moving business began operating between Chicago and Milwaukee. Some shippers used trucks for the first part of a haul that would have required two rail carriers, avoiding the transfer between railroads. In June 1917, nine new trucks were driven from Hartford, Wisconsin, to Baltimore—1,200 miles—under their own power because the manufacturer couldn’t get railroad cars; and in Connecticut, when the railroads embargoed certain classes of freight, truck transport made it possible to keep factories open.[1]
By August 1917, car shortages and embargoes had diverted so much traffic to trucks that the highways began to show signs of distress. Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and New England had fairly good networks of bituminous macadam roads; but these were of light construction, seldom more than 7 or 8 inches thick, and also were in many places only 14 to 16 feet wide. At this time all trucks ran on solid rubber tires, and since there were no laws against overloading, many were loaded to the full capacity of their engines. Within a few months maintenance costs began to soar, as the thin road crusts wore out and broke through. The States and counties were unable to get railroad cars to haul stone and bituminous material, and they increased over-the-road hauling with their own trucks, throwing a further load on the highways. The Connecticut Legislature made an emergency appropriation of $6.5 million just to keep the main highways passable for traffic. Massachusetts spent $2 million on maintenance of State highways alone and $1.25 million for resurfacing and strengthening trunk routes. Other States were faced with similar huge expenditures at a time of rapidly escalating costs and labor shortage.
The Plight of the Highway Contractors
The large highway bond issues of 1915 and 1916, plus the prospect of sizable road expenditures under the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act, led many experienced and inexperienced contractors into the road business. With the outbreak of war, they immediately began to encounter difficulties in getting materials, especially steel, and in retaining labor on the job. Within a few months material costs advanced 20 to 30 percent and wages of common labor went up to $2.50 and even $3.00 per day. Railroad car shortages made deliveries of stone and asphalt uncertain. Large numbers of contractors were forced out of business, and others, having completed their contracts, refused to bid for new work.
The virtual collapse of the highway construction industry created a desperate situation for States and counties struggling to keep the roads open in the face of ever-increasing numbers of heavy trucks and devastating losses of personnel to war industry and the Army. What made the job particularly heartbreaking was the sentiment openly expressed in some segments of the war effort hierarchy that roadbuilding was nonessential work that should be discontinued for the duration of the emergency.
At the turn of the 20th century, the Hicks Company in Rockville, Md., was making local deliveries of dry goods. This was a forerunner of the scene on a much larger scale during World War I when local deliveries for all kinds of goods became a demand with the advent of motorized delivery trucks.
As the summer of 1917 advanced, a coal famine began to develop in the industrial eastern States because of the shortage of railway cars. Production of munitions was beginning to be affected when the Priority Board of the Council of National Defense issued Priority Order No. 2, to be effective November 1, 1917, prohibiting the use of open top cars other than flat cars for shipping supplies, other than coal, for construction, maintenance and repair of public and private highways, streets, and sidewalks or for theaters and other places of amusement.[2] This peremptory order, issued without public hearings or other advance warning, struck the States “like a bolt from the blue,” at a particularly bad time. It caught them with many miles of new road graded but not surfaced with winter approaching. Despite the fact that trucking had already released thousands of cars for war purposes and the roads in the vicinity of cantonments and ports of embarkation were being pounded to pieces by truck traffic, the Priority Board refused to recede from its position, and road work
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