Paved Roads & Public Money. Richard DeLuca
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officials and Congress to sort through the legal, legislative, and engineering details of a national highway effort.
There were several overriding concerns, first and foremost the legality of such a program. After efforts in the early 1800s to create a national highway program were vetoed by three different presidents on the grounds that the national government had no authority to build roads within individual states, the issue was resolved in 1907 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Wilson v. Shaw, which stated directly the government’s right under the Constitution to build interstate highways: “This power in former times was exerted to a very limited extent … and many of our statesmen entertained doubts as to the existence of the power to establish ways of communication by land … [but] land transportation has so vastly increased [and] a sounder consideration of the subject has prevailed and led to the conclusion that Congress has plenary power over the whole subject. Congress, therefore, has … the power … to authorize the construction of a public highway connecting several states.”37
But what roads should the federal government build? What should the purpose of such a program be? As in many states, the debate centered on whether a highway program should focus on short sections of roadway whose improvement was intended to aid rural farmers in reaching the nearest railroad or market town, or on longer stretches of improvements that would facilitate long-distance interstate travel for everyone. By 1916, when Congress passed the first Federal Aid Highway Act, appropriating $75 million over five years to states with functioning highway departments (on a fifty-fifty matching basis), a decision was made to use federal funds for “such projects as will expedite the completion of an adequate and connected system of highways, interstate in character.” In an effort to placate rural citizens, funds were apportioned according to a formula weighted one third on the area of the state, one third on its population, and one third on its rural road mileage. Once the improved highways were built, they were to be maintained by their respective states.38
It was a momentous decision. For the first time in the nation’s history, the federal government agreed to direct funding of highway improvements. The program itself, however, was much less momentous, mainly because the diversion of manpower and resources to the war in Europe delayed improvements under the new federal program. By the time the five-year program ended in 1921, less than five hundred miles of highway had been improved nationwide, barely a drop in the proverbial bucket.39
Yet the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916 established an important precedent, and when the program came up for renewal—just in time to meet the postwar boom in automobile ownership—it was thoroughly revised to create a more aggressive road-building program. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 created a historic partnership between federal and state governments, with the states building in effect a trunk line system of federal-aid highways, to a maximum of 7 percent of a given state’s total road mileage. In addition, three-sevenths of the federal system was to be comprised of roads “interstate in character,” on which the state was free to spend up to 60 percent of its federal appropriation. Once again, states were held responsible for ongoing maintenance of the federal highways (at their own expense) as they were for the matching state money required by the program.40
To help states define the federal system, the Department of Agriculture formed a Joint Board of Interstate Highways to select the final network from the 7 percent mileage submitted by each state. In 1925, the secretary of agriculture approved and numbered a system that included some 169,000 federal-aid highway miles nationwide.41 In Connecticut, this network consisted of three east-west routes: U.S. Route 1 along the shoreline from Greenwich to Stonington, U.S. Route 6 across the center of the state from Danbury to Killingly, and U.S. Route 44 in northern Connecticut from Salisbury to Putnam. These were supplemented by four north-south routes: in western Connecticut, U.S. Route 7 from Norwalk to North Canaan; U.S. Routes 5 and 5a in the center of the state from New Haven to Enfield and Suffield, respectively; and U.S. Route 202 from Danbury to Granby.
The designation of an ongoing federal highway program helped states like Connecticut in several ways. First, the influx of federal funds added to the budgetary power and prestige of the Connecticut Highway Department. Second, the highways assigned to the federal system, interstate in character, were by definition more heavily traveled, and therefore more costly than other routes to improve and maintain. Third, federal approval and funding of highway projects allowed the federal government to institute policy requirements, such as design standards, that improved safety and created uniformity from state to state. But most importantly, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 established a megagovernmental model of joint federal-state cooperation and financing that through the years could be expanded to match the state’s expanding highway needs. It was also a model that would be adapted to federal funding for other transportation programs, such as aviation, and later to nontransportation social programs as well.
In the 1920s, with the federal-state partnership firmly established by the new highway act and much of the state’s trunk line system of roads and bridges now firmly in state hands, Connecticut’s highway program entered a new phase. As car engines became more powerful, highwaymen turned their attention from paving to other roadway characteristics, such as lane width, gradient, and sight line. Existing roadways were not just paved over but straightened; bridges were widened; hills were flattened to lower the steepness of a grade; and other dangerous situations, such as at-grade railroad crossings were modified or eliminated. At times, the need for such improvements resulted in a complete relocation of a roadway, moved to a new right-of-way and rebuilt to modern specifications. And of course, as trucks became larger, small bridges needed to be rebuilt to accommodate heavier loads.42
To pay for this never-ending cycle of highway improvements, Connecticut, like many states, resorted to a tax on gasoline. Connecticut passed its first gas tax law in 1921, imposing a one-cent per gallon tax on all gasoline sold in the state. Two years later, in keeping with the idea that highway users should pay directly for the care of the roads they traveled, gas tax revenue in Connecticut was dedicated to a separate Highway Fund to be used for highway purposes only, at the discretion of the state highway commissioner. As a result, by 1927, the state highway program had three main sources of revenue: the state gas tax (by then 2¢ per gallon), fees charged to register motor vehicles and license drivers, and federal monies from the general fund of the United States dedicated to the construction and maintenance of the state’s federal highway system. Such was the increase in motor vehicle registrations and gasoline consumption that by 1928, despite the expanding responsibilities of the Connecticut Highway Department, the state’s highway program had become financially self-sufficient, able to fund projects from these three dedicated sources of revenue without the need for money from the state’s general fund.43
The Connecticut Highway Department was the largest and fastest-growing agency of state government, with an annual budget that grew from $45,000 in 1896 to $16,000,000 in 1928. That year, the department was reorganized into five bureaus: engineering and construction, business administration, maintenance, roadside development, and boundaries and right-of-way. The offices of the newly reconstituted department were then relocated to a new State Office Building constructed on Capitol Avenue in Hartford, its very existence a sign that other areas of state government were growing too in their bureaucracy, albeit not as rapidly as the Connecticut Highway Department.44
In 1931, the Connecticut Highway Department expanded its responsibilities yet again by creating a town-aid program through which it passed state funds to towns for use in local highway improvements, in much the way that the national government passed funds to the state for use on federal-aid highways. The town-aid program represented the final piece of an interlocking, three-tiered program of highway improvements (federal, state, and town) held together by a powerful megagovernment bureaucracy controlling interagency financing.45
Though highway revenues declined during the Great Depression to a level of about twelve million dollars per year, the Connecticut Highway Department remained one of the most powerful state agencies, still able to fund highway improvements on a pay-as-you-go basis without the need for long-term borrowing by the state. In a span of just four decades, Connecticut highways had gone from a network of unkempt nineteenth-century earthen turnpikes to a modern system of primary, secondary, and local highways (and bridges) built for the auto age,