Page:America's Highways 1776–1976.djvu/166

 traditions of English common law and also most American statute law, which granted to abutters the very rights highway administrators now sought to take away.

The Bronx Kiver Parkway Commission acquired a broad expanse of parkland along each side of the parkway road. This practice effectively controlled access to the road while avoiding the question of the loss of access rights to abutting property owners. However, there was some doubt as to whether this was really sufficient, and the Westchester County Parkway Commission made it their practice to purchase access rights and specifically mention them in the deeds. The Pennsylvania Legislature in the act creating the Turnpike Commission gave the Commission the power to acquire access rights, by eminent domain, if necessary. However, very few State legislatures conferred such rights on their highway commissions. By 1945 only 17 States had laws permitting the control of access to State highways.

The Committee on Planning and Design Policies skirted this ticklish question by saying,

"Where State laws permit, control of access shall be obtained on all new locations and on all old locations wherever economically possible. . . In those States which do not have legal permission to acquire control of access, additional right-of-way should be obtained adequate for the building of frontage roads connecting with controlled access points, if and when necessary."

When the war ended, the States were well prepared with plans for the largest highway program in history. On the shelf ready to go were plans for $590 million worth of road improvements, and plans for another $2.5 billion worth of work were well advanced. A total of about $624 million in Federal aid was available from prewar and postwar authorizations, and most of the States had ample matching funds saved up during the war/ Most highway departments anticipated some difficulty in obtaining trained engineers and building contractors, but this did not seem at first to be a great obstacle.

On October 2, 1945, Congress, by concurrent resolution, declared that the war emergency had been relieved to such an extent that the postwar road program authorized by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 could proceed. About the same time most of the wartime restrictions on road building were lifted. Eager to launch the postwar program as soon as possible, and urged on by the PEA, the State highway departments advertised hundreds of jobs during the winter of 1945–46, some of them for very large bridges or urban expressways.

The result was, in some respects, a repetition of the 1920 experience. During World War II the inflation in road construction prices had been held to about 6 percent per year by price controls, and after 1943, by scarcity of work. A number of contractors had gone out of business, and those remaining were short of serviceable equipment and labor. The increased offerings of the State highway departments in 1945 and 1946 quickly saturated the available capacity of the construction industry and prices began to rise. At the same time materials scarcities developed, particularly in steel and lumber, which were in great demand for housing. The general uncertainty in prices and supplies resulted in higher bids, and by the end of 1946, the prices of highway structures had risen 24 percent over the 1945 level. Concrete pavement was up 12 percent.

The States began rejecting the low bids that were far above preliminary estimates in an attempt to stem the tide of advancing prices. By the end of fiscal year 1946, only 1,958 contracts for $298 million of construction had been awarded—less than a third of earlier expectations. Twenty-two percent of all low bids received had been rejected as too high. In some States, rejections ran as high as 30 percent of the low bids received.

This policy of rejecting low bids was ineffective, largely because the country was in the early stages of a building boom fueled not only by the State road programs, but also by large city expressway schemes, a huge increase in housing, and construction for industrial reconversion.

In August 1946, the Director of War Mobilization and Reconversion restricted highway construction to ease competition with the housing program for scarce materials. This restriction was lifted in October except for structural steel, but it had its effect along with rising prices in reducing State contract awards. Prices in 1947 reached a level 45 percent above 1945 prices and nearly double the prewar level. Unwilling to admit that prices had risen permanently to a new plateau, the States rejected 18 percent of all low bids received in fiscal year 1947.

Despite these difficulties, the States made a much better showing in 1947 than 1946, awarding contracts for 47,163 miles of road estimated to cost $817.7 million. Most of these were for rural primary or rural secondary roads and for simple projects such as repaving which did not require right-of-way or expensive plans.

The situation was quite different in the urban areas where most of the projects were arterial street widenings, new expressways or large bridges. Some of these schemes were very large indeed and required the acquisition and demolition of hundreds of buildings and the relocation of many families at a time when it was almost impossible to find other housing for them.

The State highway departments, usually in cooperation with the large cities or urban counties, started over a score of expensive expressway projects in 1947, each expected to cost in the millions. New York began clearing the way for the $34 million Cross-Bronx Expressway and the equally expensive Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Massachusetts began the Northern Circumferential Highway around the Boston metropolitan area, while Michigan launched the John C. Lodge Expressway and the Edsel Ford Expressway in Detroit, each expected to cost over $6 million per mile. In Chicago work began on the Congress Street Expressway, an eight-lane depressed freeway designed to accommodate 4,000 vehicles per hour in each direction, and estimated to cost $69 million. Expressways in Denver, Dallas, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Oakland, Jacksonville, Miami, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh added to the huge total.

The shortages of contractors, labor, materials and equipment persisted through 1947, 1948, and into 1949. 160