Page:America's Highways 1776–1976.djvu/270



Everyone plans. One may spend hours and days planning a vacation trip abroad. A housewife plans constantly—from the trip to the store for the week’s supply of groceries to the time to put the vegetables on the stove for dinner. Engineers locate and design a section of road and portray their results by a construction plan. And perhaps the ultimate example is the successful result of planning to land a man on the moon and return him to earth.

Highway planning, however, is different. In most cases the individual, or even a huge organization such as the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, is planning something he or it expects to do. The ultimate result of highway planning, more recently broadened to be called highway transportation planning, is the development of a highway system to provide for the movement of vehicles—vehicles not under the control of the planner but of the great number of individuals who drive them. Highway transportation is mostly, up to 96 percent, people driving themselves or transporting their goods in their own vehicles. The highway planner plans a system and the engineer builds and maintains it, but they do not provide highway transportation. A railroad company provides transportation; an airline provides transportation; a transit company provides transportation; but the highway agency provides for transportation.

From another viewpoint, the question sometimes is raised as to whether we in the United States do any highway planning. It is reasoned that there were over 2,350,000 miles of rural roads and city streets at the time of the advent of the automobile, so what we have been doing for some 75 years is highway improvement planning. Literally that is nearly true, for most of the mileage added has been in the expanding suburban areas, with little planning, at least by highway planners, and most of the planning has been directed toward upgrading the early roads on or close to their original locations. Notable exceptions are seen in the Interstate System, which surely is a system planned by highway planners for highway transportation, and in the great undeveloped State of Alaska where new routes are being laid out to permit development of its natural resources. So compared to the many underdeveloped countries, the United States has in effect been doing not highway planning, but highway improvement planning.

Even in view of these qualifications, however, for the purposes of this chapter, the term highway planning will be used in a generic sense and will include whatever is done by the highway planners in facilitating highway transportation, coordinating it with other modes, and helping make it compatible with social and community values, whether the community be the smallest town, a metropolitan area, or the entire Nation. 264