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5 Changing Visions and Regulations for Highway Planning The Federal and State Roles and Urban Routes In a 1970 essay reviewing the Eisenhower presidency and its accomplishments , Daniel Moynihan decisively and dramatically declared: [T]here was one program of truly transcendent, continental consequence. This was a program which the twenty-first century will almost certainly judge to have had more influence on the shape and development of American cities, the distribution of population within metropolitan area and across the nation as a whole, the location of industry and various kinds of employment opportunities (and, through all these, immense influence on race relations and the welfare of black Americans) than any initiative of the middle third of the twentieth century. This was, of course, the Interstate and Defense Highway System. It has been, it is, the largest public works program in history. Activities such as urban renewal, public housing, community development, and the like are reduced to mere digressions when compared to the extraordinary impact of the highway program.1 A federal “interstate highway program” has, in effect, been in existence since 1916, only 3 years after Henry Ford began mass production of the Model T. In that year, Congress approved the first in a series of programs of continuing federal aid for highways, apportioning funds among the states amounting to half of the construction costs of “rural post roads,” the roadways over which mail was transported.2 The Federal Highway Act of 1921, which superseded the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 , stated that federal officials should “give preference to such projects as will expedite the completion of an adequate and connected systems of highways, interstate in character.” In addition, it called upon each of the states to designate a formal system of “primary or interstate highways” and “secondary or intercounty highways” for federal aid purposes. The primary highways were not to exceed three-sevenths of the 104 Chapter 5 total mileage designated for federal aid, and the secondary highways were to make up the balance of the total mileage. However, the three-sevenths limitation was ignored by federal and state officials, who considered all roads within the federal aid system to be “primary” roads.3 The contemporary Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, commonly known as the interstate system, traces its origins to a series of studies that began in the late 1930s. These studies were authorized under the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938, which required the Bureau of Public Roads, the forerunner of the Federal Highway Administration, to study the feasibility of constructing a system of three north–south and three east–west transcontinental highways. These superhighways were initially proposed as a network of toll roads. The bureau’s report, Toll Roads and Free Roads, showed that such a toll network would not be self-supporting; instead, the report advocated a toll-free interregional network of highways.4 In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed a committee, headed by Commissioner of Public Roads Thomas H. MacDonald, of the Bureau of Public Roads, to assess the need for a national system of expressways.5 The National Interregional Highway Committee produced its report, Interregional Highways, in 1944. The report advocated the construction of a system of 33,900 miles of rural roadways, in addition to 5,000 miles of auxiliary urban roadways.6 In response to this and other initiatives, Congress passed the FederalAid Highway Act of 1944 and began the creation of the National System of Interstate Highways. The act declared that up to 40,000 miles of roadway would be located to “connect by routes, direct as practical, the principal metropolitan areas, cities, and industrial centers, to serve the national defense, and to connect at suitable border points, routes of continental importance in the Dominion of Canada and the Republic of Mexico.”7 The act provided a federal share of 50 percent for construction costs for primary, secondary, and urban highways. In creating what was called the ABC program, the aim of Congress was to meet the needs of individual states for development of an interstate network of main highways and farm-to-market and feeder roads. For the first time, federal funding for urban extensions was provided.8 The act directed the designation of the interstate system but did not specify that the system was to be financed differently from the primary program (50 percent). Subsequent to this act, state highway agencies prepared, often for the first time, comprehensive [18.219.140...

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