Page:America's Highways 1776–1976.djvu/271

 The coordination between the California DOT and the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, from planning through construction of over 11 miles of rail and highway facilities, saved the taxpayers millions of dollars, caused a minimum of disruption to the communities, and made the best use of the land by evaluating shared social values and esthetics for the benefit of all.

This discussion of highway planning will be devoted primarily to the period beginning in 1934, the year of the passage of the Hayden-Cartwright Act (Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona and Representative Wilburn Cartwright of Oklahoma) that made highway planning possible on an organized and formal basis. Yet planning obviously was an essential feature of highway development even in colonial days.

Before the railroads put a temporary end to highway development, roads were definitely planned to meet such specific needs as connecting principal cities and opening new territory to development or for military purposes. The birth of highway transportation as we know it probably can be dated as 1893, when J. Frank Duryea first drove his gasoline buggy on the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts. Roads until then were being improved generally in short sections radiating from towns and railroad shipping points and were primarily for the movement of farm products. The availability of the automobile, first usable only in towns and cities and as “pleasure” vehicles, soon brought demands for improvement of larger sections, and especially in the eastern States, connecting the towns with one another.

It was this demand for connecting or trunk roads that brought about the first real differences among highway users, and what might be called the first highway planning—whether to concentrate on the trunk roads or continue to extend the radius of the farm-to-market roads. The question was settled early in the small eastern States in favor of the former rather than the farmer. In 1903 Rhode Island adopted a definite system of State highways for construction by the State Board of Public Roads. A similar proposal in Connecticut in 1901 was finally enacted in 1913, while Maryland in 1908 adopted an intercounty seat trunkline system, the first to be placed under State control for both construction and 265