Page:America's Highways 1776–1976.djvu/133

 The first centerline on a rural State highway was painted between Marquette and Ishpeming, Mich., in 1917.

Aside from TJpham’s arguments, there were two main justifications for straight highways. Having no curves, they were thought to be less hazardous to drive and also practically immune to obsolescence, since a straight road can be driven at the maximum speed of which an automobile is capable. This last argument was important at a time when speed records were falling almost every year at the Indianapolis Speedway and many engineers were predicting stock car speeds of 70 or even 80 miles per hour.

The safety argument was even more persuasive. Throughout the 1920’s highway fatalities kept pace with the growth of the vehicle fleet and by 1924 had reached almost 20,000 per year. Recognizing that the problem was national in scope, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover convened the First National Conference on Street and Highway Safety in Washington in December 1924. Here, for the first time, representatives of State highway and motor vehicle commissions, police, insurance companies, the steam and electric railroads, safety councils and chambers of commerce, labor unions, women’s clubs, automobile associations, automotive manufacturers, and truck and bus operators met in one place to discuss means of abating what was already a national scandal.

Committees appointed 6 months in advance reported wide differences in traffic regulations from State to State and city to city. They found “an almost total lack of systematic effort to secure accurate and complete data regard such [traffic] accidents, their types 127