Route 1 to Tomorrow

Thirty-five years ago this month, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker bade Godspeed to a convoy of 63 Army trucks leaving Washington on a daring transcontinental trek to prove that the gasoline engine had really replaced the mule. With the motor train rode a young Army observer, Lieut. Dwight D. Eisenhower. When the trucks crawled into San Francisco on Sept. 5, after 60 days and 6,000 breakdowns, the lieutenant was a confirmed advocate of an adequate, all-weather U.S. road system.

This year 66 million Americans, riding in 22 million automobiles, will take to the highways (most of them this month and next), traveling an average 1,200 miles in eleven vacation days, staying at 50,000 motor courts, and spend $10 billion as they go. The superhighways they will travel are a far cry from the primitive roads that Lieut. Eisenhower and his companions bumped along 35 years ago, but they are still inadequate to the times and to the nation's needs, and growing more so every year. Last week, in recognition of that fact, Dwight Eisenhower proposed a bold program of road building and improvement, including, for the first time in Federal planning, a national panacea for the parking problem. Estimated cost: $50 billion over the next ten years.

1,340,000 Casualties. The President's plan was presented to the 1954 Governors' Conference at Bolton Landing, N.Y. by Vice President Richard Nixon. The need for an up-to-date road system, Nixon said, is dramatically evident in the annual statistics of highway deaths and injuries (1,340,000 in 1953, or nearly 20 times the total casualties in the first year of the Korean war).

Less poignant than the highway casualty lists, but still a perilous fault of the highway network, is its increasing failure to nourish the nation's economic life. Highways form a major circulatory system for U.S. industry and agriculture; when they become worn out and clogged with automotive arteriosclerosis, as they have in the past 15 years, the economy suffers. In the same vein, the Vice President pointed out. the country's roads would present "appalling inadequacies" in time of war or catastrophe.

Behind the Load. All the governors knew that U.S. road building, slowed down during World War II, has never caught up with the growing traffic load, which has been building up at the rate of one million vehicle registrations each year in the last 20. But their first reaction to the President's plan was to shy like startled fawns. Some feared that it would mean federal absorption of the existing $4 billion-a-year federal and state highway program. The fact is that the President's "grand plan," as stated, would augment existing programs. Others were alarmed at the prospect of such a vast spending of federal funds. Actually, the President hopes the program will be largely self-liquidating in the long run, possibly through road tolls and gasoline taxes, and the states would share planning and authority, and probably the initial costs, with the Federal Government.

After hurried checking with the White House, the governors calmed down, agreed to cooperate and to give the President the benefit of their recommendations by next December. By February, after a series of regional conferences, President Eisenhower expects to have his long-range program plotted out and ready to move ahead at top speed as soon as Congress flashes a green light.

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