A New Look at the Federal-Aid Program

This 47th annual meeting of the American Road Builders' Association is an appropriate time to pause and look back over the road we have traveled, and attempt as wisely as possible to evaluate the current Federal-aid program in the light of existing highway service requirements and the probable needs that will emerge in the years immediately ahead.We have come a long way since the enactment of the initial Federal-aid legislation in 1916, but we still have a long way to go to reach the goal set by Congress in the Federal-Add Acts of 1944 and 1948 for the improvement of our highways in the postwar years.Nearly five years have elapsed since the end of the war.During this period there has been an unprecedented increase in highway usage.The number of motor vehicle registrations has risen in each successive year, breaking all previous records.Today there are close to 44 million automobiles, trucks and buses rolling over our nighways, as compared with 32 million in 1940, an increase of almost 37 per cent.Traffic has increased not only in volume but in weight.An estimated 7,800,000 commercial vehicles, including trucks and buses, were registered last year.This is 67 per cent more than the 1940 total.Motor vehicles of all classes traveled about 425 billion miles on our roads and streets last year.This, too, was an all-time record.