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 In addition, a severe shortage of highway engineers developed in 1946 and became worse as the highway departments expanded their programs. Most States had failed to raise their pay scales to keep in step with the inflation, and as a result, many engineers did not return to State service after the war or left for other employment in industry.

The Bronx River Parkway with controlled access and extensive parkland along each side.

Struggling against these handicaps and the continuing high prices, the States were able to obligate only 36 percent of their Federal-aid authorizations in fiscal year 1946, 62 percent in 1947, and 79 percent in 1948. It was necessary for Congress to extend the availability of the postwar authorizations by 1 year, and the unused backlog was so large that Congress made no authorization for fiscal year 1949 and reduced the authorizations for 1950 and 1951.

Although slow, there was improvement, and in 1949 the annual mileage of completed roads had reached the 1937 level of 21,000 miles, including about 14,000 miles of farm-to-market roads. But this did not satisfy the extreme rural road advocates.

The dissatisfaction in the counties found expression in two bills before Congress which would set up a Rural Roads Division in the Public Roads Administration with authority to dispense $100 to $200 million annually to the counties and local political subdivisions without going through the State highway departments. There was also some rural sentiment for doing away with all system restrictions on rural roads so that their benefits could be more widely distributed among the rural population.

In testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Roads on these bills, Commissioner MacDonald asserted that the proposed legislation would entail a “vast amount of costly supervision” on the part of the PRA to insure that the aided roads received proper maintenance. Rural roads, he said, were necessarily of light construction and required efficient and continuous maintenance to preserve their integrity. Past experience had shown that maintenance was the very aspect of road management in which the counties were weakest. Approval of the bills, according to MacDonald, would greatly dilute and weaken the fundamentally sound rural road program already in operation. In May 1949, the Subcommittee requested Commissioner MacDonald to make a study of the rural road problem and report back to the Subcommittee by January 1950. 161