The Daily Alaska Empire

U. S. Super-Highway System
(New York Times)
Though the United States now has the most extensive road system in the world it is still, as President
Roosevelt pointed out in 1944, inadequate to accommodate the tremendous increase in major highway
traffic during the last twenty-five years. The new
long-range plan for a national network of express
highways announced by the Federal Works Agency
should take care of this increase on an integrated
scale and with country-wide facilities never before
conceived by road builders.
Even before the war no nation had a road system equal to those in the most traveled sections of
America. Both Germany and England built excellent highways for their own needs but both are small
countries compared to ours and neither faced the
motor congestion which our prosperity forces us to
suffer. Through traffic here is most efficiently
handled over such parkway networks as those worked
out in Westchester, western Connecticut, northern
New Jersey and across New York City. What the new
program, in effect, proposes is to extend this system
to the entire nation.
It will link 39,900 miles of highways along main-
traveled routes and 2,319 miles of urban circumferential and distributing avenues. As far as possible it
will incorporate highways already in use. It will provide direct north-south, east-west and diagonal access
from any part of the country to every other part.
It will serve forty-two of the forty-eight State capitals
and 182 of our 199 cities of more than 50,000 population. The super-highways, well surfaced with concrete
or asphalt, will offer four traffic lanes and eliminate
stop-lights and cross-traffic wherever peak volume
requires it. Depressed or elevated systems through
large cities are expected to sustain an average speed
of from thirty-five to forty-five miles an hour.
To accomplish all this will be a gigantic undertaking. It will be mutually financed and maintained
by State and Federal governments as our national
network is at present. The cost is calculated at around
$3,000,000,000. Heavy Federal appropriations are already available and to some extent in use. The last
three years, however, have been chiefly devoted to
planning. Final plans are now accepted and work
can proceed. Even before the project is complete its
effects on the life of the nation will be profound. All
are not now foreseeable, but such a system of inter-
state highways is bound to develop new population
centers, open new factory locations, establish new
freight routes, stimulate business and lessen regional
friction. Most of all it will bind the people of this
country into one vast neighborhood where the wants
of all can be freely supplied and the ideas of all can
freely circulate. It will mark the final peaceful conquest of an empire by the internal combustion engine.