Road Report

Congress had an admiring eye cocked on Adolf Hitler's great new system of Reich auto roads (TIME, Feb. 27) when last June it directed the Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads to investigate the feasibility of building a system of toll superhighways for the U. S. But deliberate, slow-spoken Chief Thomas Harris MacDonald has had his eye on transportation realities, with which he has composedly rubbed elbows since he was appointed to his job 20 years ago in the WTilson Administration. This week, he gave his answer in a carefully documented 212-page report.

On the super-highway plan, Tom Mac-Donald decisively turned his broad back. Three north-south and three east-west roads, he found, could be built between now and 1945. But the annual cost for construction, maintenance and operation between 1945 and 1960 would be $184,054,000, while the average tolls (at 1-c- a mile for passenger cars, 3.5-c- for trucks and busses) would be $72,140,000 a year. The roads would not pay for themselves until 1975, by which time interest would have piled up to more than a billion dollars.

But Tom MacDonald had another plan for which he plumped, a plan edited and approved by Franklin Roosevelt himself. The U. S. already has a good road system, and its arterial highways, touching every important centre of population, are not congested except near big cities and there only at certain hours. To guide Congress in speeding up inter-city traffic, MacDonald proposed a plan to improve and integrate 26,700 miles of existing arterial roads gridding every part of the U. S.

His recommendations, set out without an estimate of cost:

> Straighten dangerous curves, widen roads where needed, lower steep grades, with the States doing the work, the Federal Government supervising.

> Eliminate big-city bottlenecks by highspeed depressed or elevated highways straight through town; by-pass small towns and villages.

> Acquire all the rights of way needed with Federal funds, to be paid back by the States on easy terms over a 50-year period.

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