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 Report and Recommendations of the National Interregional Highway Committee

INTRODUCTION Construction of the present main highway system of the United States began in the later years of the horse-and-buggy era of highway transportation. At that time the Nation possessed a rural road network almost as extensive as at present, but it was almost wholly unimproved. By necessity all travel by road was of the shortest range.

In the cities, on the other hand, most of the streets were paved, some with cobble but many with smooth asphalt and brick. It was mainly the desire of new-fledged motorists in the cities for a comfortable ride into the country beyond the reaches of their paved streets, the similar deferred hope of more humble cyclists, and the competing aims of merchants in each town and city to enlarge or at least to hold, each his own rural trade, that prodded a long-talking “good roads movement” into actual construction.

The construction of roads begun, years of promiscuous building followed. Finally the builders awakened to the hopelessness of ever joining the thousands of disconnected little pieces of roads those years had produced. They began to realize the need for systematically classifying the vast road network and giving preferential order to the improvement of the portions of greatest use potential.

The original Federal Aid Road Act, passed in 1916, did not require such a classification. But by that time a few States, seeing the light, had created State highway systems of selected routes—usually those routes joining their several county seats and larger towns and cities.

To this sound principle of classification and preferential improvement beyond any other the means of the rapid and orderly subsequent development of the main highways—the Federal Highway Act of 1921 gave endorsement and national extension. It required designation of the Federal-aid highway system and confined to this system all Federal funds then and thereafter to be appropriated for aid in road improvement—a restriction that was to remain in effect unaltered for many years.

At that time, the beginning of the century’s third decade, the unimproved sections of roads chosen to make up the newly designated Federal-aid system were still far longer in the aggregate than the length of those that had been in some manner constructed. Most of the State highway systems were at the same early stage of development.

But the rapid upswing of motor-vehicle use had already set in. Each successive year more road-improvement revenue was coming in, largely from fees paid for vehicle registrations, from new motor-fuel 1