NORMAN BEL GEDDES
$3.50
With over thirty million automobiles in the United States today, and the problems of ve- hicular transportation increasingly complex and pressing, it seems almost incredible that this should be the first and only book that has ever comprehensively treated the subject both historically and with a view to offering a solution. Norman Bel Geddes, one of the foremost designers in the world, has been studying the situation intensively for several years. Out of his research came recently his spectacularly successful General Motors Fu- turama for the New York World's Fair, and now this fascinating book.
Magic Motorways, after a brief review of the history of old and new roads and auto- motive traffic in America, presents a detailed plan for an entirely new type of national motorways system. At first, some of its fea- tures may strike the reader as a fantastic dream, but Mr. Geddes proves their practic- ability. Grandma wrapped her linen duster around her neck and fearfully went out for a spin at eight dizzy miles an hour. But your grandchildren will snap across the entire con- tinent in 24 hours on a new kind of highway and in a new kind of car that is controlled by the push of a button!
This book is illustrated with numerous original drawings and over 150 photographs. It will prove of vital interest to everyone who drives or rides on the crowded city streets or highways of America.
A RANDOM HOUSE BOOK
RANDOM HOUSE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
1 . Highways and Horizons
2. Safety, Comfort, Speed and Economy 1 5
3. Eliminate the Human Factor in Driving 43
4. Separated Lanes of Traffic 59
5 . Every Highway Intersection Is Obsolete 8 3
6. Full Speed Through Bottlenecks 105
7. Daylight Standards for Night Driving 123
8. From the Atlantic to the Pacific in One Day 141
9. Eliminate Graft and Double Highway Construction 165
10. Motorway Service to Towns and Villages 185
11. Motorway Tributaries to Cities 203
12. Accelerating City Traffic One Hundred Per Cent 221
13. The Need for Increased Distribution 247
14. Thinking for Our Grandchildren 263
15. Effects of a National Motorway System 285
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could hardly have been written without the invaluable help of Roger Nowland and Worthen Paxton, for whose constant encouragement and able advice I am very grateful; of Joan Geddes and William Harlan Hale in an editorial capacity; of Joseph Goldsen for statistical and historical material; of Peter Schladermundt and Russell Fudge, in assembling the illustrations.
It would be quite impossible adequately to thank all the other individuals and or- ganizations who, in one way or another, have assisted me in the preparation of this volume. The book is the result of five years' concentrated study by members of my organization and people on the outside who have most generously put themselves at our disposal.
I have made liberal use, not always accredited in the text, of the knowledge and ideas of the following organizations:
American Association of State Highway Officials
American Road Builders Association
Automobile Club of Southern California
Automobile Manufacturers Association
Institute of Traffic Engineers
National Highway Users Conference
National Research Council
National Safety Council
Port of New York Authority
Public Roads Administration
Regional Plan Association of New York
State Highway Departments of numerous states, especially New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and California
Yale University Bureau for Street Traffic Research
NBG
HIGHWAYS AND HORIZONS
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IIVE million people saw the Futurama of the General Motors Highways and Horizons Exhibit at the New York World's Fair during the summer of 1939. In long queues that often stretched more than a mile, from 5,000 to 15,000 men, women and children at a time, stood, all day long every day, under the hot sun and in the rain, waiting more than an hour for their turn to get a sixteen-minute glimpse at the motorways of the world of to- morrow. There have been hit shows and sporting events in the past which had waiting lines for a few days, but never before had there been a line as long as this, renewing itself continuously, month after month, as there was every day at the Fair.
The people who conduct polls to find out why other people do things, and the editorial writers, newspaper men and columnists who report daily on the doings of the human race, all had their theory as to why the Futurama was the most popular show of any Fair in history. And most of them agreed that the explanation was really very simple: All of these thousands of people who stood in line ride in motor cars and therefore are harassed by the daily task of
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General Motors
ENTRANCE RAMPS TO GENERAL MOTORS WORLD'S FAIR FUTURAMA EXHIBIT
getting from one place to another, by the nuisances of intersectional jams, narrow, congested bottlenecks, dangerous night driving, annoying police- men's whistles, honking horns, blinking traffic lights, confusing highway signs, and irritating traffic regulations; they are appalled by the daily toll of highway accidents and deaths ; and they are eager to find a sensible way out of this planless, suicidal mess. The Futurama gave them a dramatic and graphic solution to a problem which they all faced.
Masses of people can never find a solution to a problem until they are shown the way. Each unit of the mass may have a knowledge of the problem, and each may have his own solution, but until mass opinion is crystallized, brought into focus and made articulate, it amounts to nothing but vague grumbling. One of the best ways to make a solution understandable to everybody is to make it visual, to dramatize it. The Futurama did just this: it was a visual dramatization of a solution to the complex tangle of American roadways.
As all those who saw it know, the Futurama is a large-scale model represent- ing almost every type of terrain in America and illustrating how a motorway system may be laid down over the entire country — across mountains, over rivers and lakes, through cities and past towns — never deviating from a direct course and always adhering to the four basic principles of highway design: safety, comfort, speed and economy. The motorways which stretch across the model
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Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison THROUGH MOUNTAINS
Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison SPANNING RIVERS
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Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
SKIRTING CITIES
Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
PAST TOWNS
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are exact replicas, in small scale, of motorways which may be built in America in the near future. They are designed to make automobile collisions impossible and to eliminate completely traffic congestion. Particular features of the motorways may perhaps be improved on, details of future road construction and engineering may differ, but the design of these motorways has been care- fully and thoughtfully worked out and is suggestive of probable future developments.
Much of the initial appeal of the Futurama was due to its imaginative qual- ity. But the reason that its popularity never diminished was that its boldness was based on soundness. The plan it presented appealed to the practical engineer as much as to the idle day-dreamer. The motorways which it featured were not only desirable, but practical.
As each spectator rode around the model in his comfortable, upholstered armchair, he listened to a description of it in a voice which came from a small speaker built into the back of the chair. This recorded description synchro- nized with the movement of the chairs and explained the main features of what was passing before the spectator's eyes. It directed his attention to the great arterial highways which were segregated into different speed lanes and which looked so different from the roads of today. It pointed out the over- passes, high-speed intersections and wide bridges over which tear-drop motor cars whisked by at a hundred miles an hour. It commented in passing on the surrounding scenery, the planned cities, decentralized communities and ex- perimental farms. But it did not describe in detail how any of this was to be accomplished. It did not explain how the highway system worked. It could not dwell at length on any specific points of interest because of the short time available.
There was much more to see, and no time to see it. There was much more to explain, and no time to explain it. Millions of people, by waiting patiently for
Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
STREET INTERSECTION— CITY OF TOMORROW— WORLD'S FAIR 1939
%
their turn in the chairs, demonstrated that the prospects of America's future concern them. They showed that the problems of transportation vitally inter- est them. But there was no time to satisfy that interest fully. They saw the world of tomorrow lying there invitingly before them — a world that looked like Utopia and that did not seem to have a very close relation to the world they knew. But they weren't let in on the secret of how it had developed; they weren't told how it worked.
This book will take you backstage. It will answer the many questions which the Futurama left unanswered. The Futurama and this book are two different treatments of the same material. The book is a description of the exhibit, just as the exhibit is an illustration of this text. And the book will do two things which the Futurama could not do. First, it will describe the premises, based on American experience, on which such a future transportation system is built; and second, it will suggest the consequences, technical and economic and so- cial, which will result from such a future transportation system. Starting from the facts of congestion, confusion, waste and accidents, we have gone through analysis and blueprints until we have come out on the other side with an over-all plan. We have come out with transcontinental roads built for a maximum of one hundred and a minimum of fifty miles an hour. We have come out with cars that are automatically controlled, which can be driven safely even with the driver's hands off the wheel. We have discovered that people could be driving from San Francisco to New York in twenty-four hours if roads were properly designed. Peering through the haze of the present toward 1960 is a great adventure. It is an adventure so broad in its attack and so far-reaching in its consequences that there is no reason why each reader, layman as well as expert, should not repeat it now for himself and discover where it leads.
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Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
PLANNED MIDWEST METROPOLIS 20 YEARS FROM NOW
In designing the Futurama, we reproduced actual sections of the country — Wyoming, Pennsylvania, California, Missouri, New York, Idaho, Virginia — combining them into a continuous terrain. We used actual American cities — St. Louis, Council Bluffs, Reading, New Bedford, Concord, Rutland, Omaha, Colorado Springs — projecting them twenty years ahead. And we of course took already existing highways into account, making use of their most advanced features and, at the same time, projecting them also twenty years ahead.
There are many highways which strike us today as excellent — among others, the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, the boulevard through the Great Smokies in the Southeast, the highway over the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, and New York City's great system of approaches and peripheral
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highways. In comparison with what we have had in the past, these are fine roads, representing a tremendous advance over the roads of yesterday. But the roads of tomorrow will represent an equally great advance over those of the present, and it is toward this future development that the Futurama pointed the way.
The Motorway System as visualized in the Futurama and described in this book has been arbitrarily dated ahead to 1960 — twenty years from now. But it could be built today. It is not too large a job for a generation which has replaced the plodding horse and buggy with the swift-moving automobile, which has grown wings and spanned the world with them, which has built skyscrapers a thousand feet high. Modern engineering is capable of mag- nificent accomplishments.
Already the automobile has done great things for people. It has taken man out beyond the small confines of the world in which he used to live. Distant communities have been brought closer together. Throughout all recorded history, man has made repeated efforts to reach out farther and to communi- cate with other men more easily and quickly, and these efforts have reached the climax of their success in the twentieth century. This increasing freedom of movement makes possible a magnificently full, rich life for the people of our time. A free-flowing movement of people and goods across our nation is a requirement of modern living and prosperity.
People who have achieved a partial success are often inclined to sit back self-satisfied and blind themselves to the fact that the success is only partial. Because we today move more freely than our ancestors, we have a tendency to overlook the fact that we should be able to move ten times more freely. We are satisfied with the mere possession of
MEN, MACHINES OR SHEEP?
Ewing Gall<
the automobile, and fail to make use of its full potentialities. Many of us do not realize that our cars can reliably do up to eighty-five miles an hour, but that the average speed of motor traffic in the United States is twenty miles an hour; that although our cars have been designed for efficiency and econ- omy, the loss due to traffic congestion in New York City alone is a million dollars a day; that although our cars have been designed for safety, there is a death toll on American roads today of almost four lives every hour, ninety every single day, 2,700 a month, and 32,400 a year! Until recently, we have been told that the cure for these paradoxes lies in hit-or-miss, spasmodic road "improvements" and catchy safety slogans. But we are due to open our eyes any day now, and demand a comprehensive, basic solution to a comprehensive, basic problem.
If a word-association psychologist asked you to speak the first word that comes into your head after you hear the word "traffic," you would probably answer, not "flow" or "movement," but "congestion." You would get a men- tal picture of the crowded approach to the Eads Bridge in St. Louis over the Mississippi, or of cars jammed bumper to bumper at the intersection of State and Madison in Chicago, or perhaps just of a suburban crossroad and the accident that occurred there last Saturday after the Country Club dance. The word "traffic" is usually taken to mean "too many cars." But, actually, traffic is simply the flow of cars along a road, and roads are supposed to be built to accommodate that traffic. When traffic is congested, the answer is not that there are too many cars, but that the roads have not been designed to perform
Ewinq Galloway
LOGS IN TRAFFIC
Margaret Bourke-White
their function properly. Their construction and design are inefficient. The real trouble with American highways is the simple fact that they are not designed for the traffic they bear. The automobile has advanced in much greater strides than have roads. It has attained a far greater point of perfec- tion. Automobiles are in no way responsible for our traffic problem. The
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entire responsibility lies in the faulty roads, which are behind the times.
When the horse was discarded, the winding roads over which he joggled were not discarded with him. The automobile inherited them. Some of them have been "improved" from time to time, but their basic features have remained unchanged. The result of pushing motor cars out over these old roads was at first simply a mild havoc and runaway horses, but later, the Traffic Problem. Today we are still rebuilding old roads that were constructed for another vehicle, instead of starting to build special roads for the special needs of the automobile.
This simple fact is the key to the whole present-day traffic problem.
A brief glance at the history of road building in this country will make clear how vitally this anachronism has affected the development of American automotive transportation.
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SAFETY, COMFORT, SPEED AND ECONOMY
N LAYING out roads, certain basic principles are always followed. From the beginning of time, whenever people have tried to get from one place to an- other, they have kept these same basic aims in mind. The first is their desire for self-preservation; the second is their desire for a pleasant trip; the third is their desire to reach their goal quickly; and the fourth is their desire to spend as little money and effort on the way as possible.
Now, for self-preservation, read safety; for a convenient and pleasant trip, read comfort; for a quick arrival, read speed; and for a saving of expense and effort, read economy; and you have the four main principles which guide— or should guide — the modern road builder.
Although these aims or principles are very specific, their application with reference to road development varies with enormous latitude. A bird flying from one point to another, never swerving to right or left, is following the principles of safety, comfort, speed and economy as he sees them. On the other hand, a man in a forest, moving slowly, twisting first this way then that way, avoiding dangerous ledges and carefully going out of his way to pass around
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Acme
Gandreau
SAFE (IN THE ARMS OF JESUS)
COMFORT (LOVES COMPANY)
SPEED (AND A YARD WIDE)
Acme
ECONOMY (IF YOU'VE NOTHING TO DO)
Portland Cement Assn.
obstacles, is applying the same principles as ne sees them. Several factors enter into the situation, requiring, if not modification of the principles, at least dif- ferent methods of carrying them out. The rate at which one is capable of mov- ing, the characteristics of the terrain over which one must travel, and the purpose of the journey are some of these modifying factors.
A mountain goat, marvelously sure-footed, nonchalantly travels along the narrow edge of precipitous cliffs which a man must avoid. A cow, fat and lazy, meanders zigzag across a field which another animal would traverse in half the time. A sailboat tacks first north, then south, to reach a destination toward which a steamship can aim directly. Different types of vehicles require different types of routes, in order to achieve the same ends. What is comfort- able in a slow vehicle may well be uncomfortable at a fast pace; similarly, a speed which is perfectly safe in one vehicle might be disastrous in another.
It follows from this that each type of vehicle should have its own spe- cifically designed path. The cow has its gently winding path, the wagon its wider, straighter road, the train its railroad track, the ship its sea lane, the barge its canal, the airplane its beacon lanes. Sometimes it happens that a route which was originally intended for one purpose can be adapted to another, but generally the changes which are made in the route to facilitate this adaptation end by altering it beyond recognition. It is hard to realize, for example, that many of America's most important automobile roads originated as animal tracks.
When the first white settlers moved in to open up the Middle West, they did not have to build for themselves the roads which carried them out there. They used routes already there: Indian paths and buffalo trails. The American bison, heavy yet fleet of foot, tough and hard-traveling, had torn wide paths east and west, north and south, along the high ground linking the best grazing ranges and water holes. The bison migrated freely, his range extending from
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the salt licks of Kentucky westward to the Rockies, and from the Cariboo Mountains at the northern end of Alberta, Canada, southward into Texas. The Vin- cennes Road, which runs slantwise through Chicago today, was originally tramped out by herds of bison bound west from Illinois to the prairies. The three great overland routes from the eastern part of the country to the Central West were also stamped out originally by bison: one, the route through Central New York which was later followed by the Erie Canal; two, the route through Southwestern Pennsylvania from the Potomac to Upper Ohio ; and three, the great Cumberland Gap route into Kentucky. All over the world, in fact, man has taken over the routes of animals. The buffalo and Indian trails in America were use- ful and comfortable because both animal herd and native tribe usually sought out easy grades and direct courses. They laid their roads along high land, since
forests there Were thinner and winds tended to Sweep
Copyright, Haynes, Inc.
the high trails clear of leaves in fall and of snow in TRANSCONTINENTAL ROAD ENGINEERS
winter. All primitive races travel close to the ridges,
relying on the safety of the higher ground. This custom, in fact, is the origin
of the term highway.
The buffalo is not the only animal whose roads have been followed through the centuries. While the cow is not generally thought of as a traffic expert, in her own way she too has been an outstanding highway engineer. From day to day the path that the cow follows from barn to pasture changes little. Once a path has been broken, the cow follows it year in and year out just because it is
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Underwood & Underwood
there. Man of course does the same thing, through force of habit and reliance on precedent. The origin of many roads from farm to farm and from farm to vil- lage occurred in somewhat the following way. The cow path was never the shortest distance between two points, but it had the virtue of being a track and a well-worn one. So the farmer himself followed it down to his neighbor's house, and it soon developed into a footpath. Then, by clipping shrubbery and branches along its sides, he was able to ride his horse through it. One day he managed it with a horse and cart; from that it became a wagon road. It served him well. The road gradually extended from door to door toward the town's church, and in a generation it became Main Street. So it is that the cow laid out New York's Wall Street district years ago, and, farther north, Boston's Haymarket Square. As paths grew into wagon roads, this did not mean that they were rebuilt to take care of wheeled traffic. It simply meant that a certain number of wagoners had managed somehow to scrape their way through them.
Three centuries were given in America to this kind of gradual road development. Animal trails slowly be- came pack-horse routes. By 1750 three roads in Penn- sylvania and New York were reported to be worn so broad that two pack-horses could meet and pass with- out danger to their loads. That was progress! Then the great wagon known as Conestoga made its appearance.
Gendreau
Above: LOCAL ROAD ENGINEERS
Below: WHEN "PLEASURE DRIVING" WAS YOUNG
And when it started bumping over the Alleghenies, the pack-horse trail re- ceived a diploma and became a road.
Again, that did not mean that the old route was changed. It had merely been cleared; tree-stumps and rocks still clogged it. To begin with, people then did not know how to construct a road for wheeled traffic. Nor did they have the capital or the organization to do the job. The stagecoach had been in use for fifty years before any real improvement in American roads was made.
GENTLE BRIDGES FOR GENTLE DAYS
Instead of building new roads, the old ones were patched and widened here and there in their worst spots, and a few of them were surfaced. But whatever minor changes were effected, the basic technique of laying out the road re- mained the same: rutty tracks were informally widened by hacking away enough underbrush to give a right of way. This method had inherent difficul- ties, of course. When larger and heavier vehicles were introduced and sent over routes designed for foot-traveler or animal, the original advantages of the routes were lost. The history of the Boston Post Road illustrates this. This road, which was a major military channel during the Revolutionary War, to-
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Portland Cement Assn.
day is still the main artery between Boston and New York. Throughout the decades — first for horses, then for wagons, then for stagecoaches, then for fast carriages, and finally for automobiles and buses — it has been widened and rewidened and paved and repaved. But its development has always lagged behind the development of the vehicle, so that it has never been able to serve its purpose efficiently. When Sarah Kemble Knight rode from Boston to New York on it in 1704, it was so narrow that branches brushed her from both sides, and it was so difficult to traverse that it took her eight days to make the trip. Today, when 20,000 cars a day pass over it, they pile up in jams at its narrow bridgeheads, its frequent intersections and its sharp turns.
Early in the nineteenth century, people decided to do something decisive about getting better roads. A speculative fever of private road building hit the nation. In the State of New York alone sixty-seven companies sprang up, to build toll roads or turnpikes. A paved turnpike was laid down from
Ewlng Galloway
SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS—
Philadelphia to Lancaster, at a cost of half a million dollars. The Federal Government stepped in and put up money for the Cumberland Road, a national turnpike that tied the Potomac to the heart of the West. Public enthusiasm ran high. Traffic increased.
The Cumberland Turnpike was the culmination of the movement. And it had a curious result. In the push to the West, New York State had been left behind. Accordingly, in order to get a foothold for trade, it set about building the Erie Canal. The Canal was a vast success. It beat the turnpikes at their own game. So the fever for building roads subsided almost as quickly as it had risen, and digging canals became the new national rage. The canal was popular be- cause it was efficient. And it was efficient because it was a right of way built specifically for one means of transit, rather than a makeshift, second-hand adaptation.
The next big step in American transportation came with the introduction
IS NOT ACHIEVED BY CURVES
Portland Cement Assn.
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THE IRON HORSE HAD AN IRON ROAD
of an entirely new vehicle: the locomotive. This proved to be efficient and popular also, and for the same reason: its builders estimated the needs and capacities of the new vehicle and designed a right of way for it accordingly. The first right of way for an American train was laid out on a dirt road because the train was horse-pulled. But very soon the railroad acquired a special track adapted to its own functions and its own speed. And the ultimate result of this intelligent approach to the problem is the safe, efficient and unin- terrupted railroad travel of the present day. Not that this result was achieved immediately; haste in construction often made for waste and mismanagement. It took about fifty years for the railroads to overcome the first missteps of inefficiency and planlessness. But the fact remains that their basic technical approach was sound. The history of American railroads contains many valu- able lessons for highway engineers.
Then, just before 1900, another new vehicle appeared. Along the Pumpkin- ville Pike in Indiana and similar horse roads in Massachusetts, Elwood Haynes and Charles Duryea were experimenting with the first ' 'horseless carriages." These "gasoline buggies" did not look very promising at first, and were not taken very seriously. To say that the country did not recognize the auto for what it was is to understate the case. The country recognized the auto as a rattling piece of machinery that could be counted on to break down every
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three or four miles. Nobody was going to build a new route for that. A special track had been built for the locomotive, but what had been good enough for the automobile's grandfather was considered good enough for it.
No one seemed to realize that a vehicle was developing which would revolu- tionize not only all transportation, but life in general. First of all, mechanical transportation was now for the first time being placed at the disposal of the individual to be used whenever he desired, whereas before that time all me- chanical transportation had been designed for masses of people only. Secondly, the individual driver was now going to be able to travel two or three times as fast as he had ever traveled before.
THE HORSELESS BU6GY NOSED OUT THE HORSE
Acme
All that three centuries of Americans had done in laying out, widening and brushing up roads suddenly became obsolete. Before this time, travelers had moved so slowly that it never really mattered whether their road was straight or not. No man or animal had ever struck directly across a range of mountains or a river when he could manage to travel around it. In the horse-and-buggy era, no great effort was ever made by road builders to alter or modify the natural character of terrain to reduce the distance between two points, or to smooth out large bumps and recesses. But this new vehicle was capable of high speed. In fact, its entire validity rested on its claim of speed. Curves and bumps that had never bothered the buggy forced the car to slow down. Roundabout routes whose delays had never mattered now harmed the straight- away effectiveness of the car. But this was not understood. The new car was pushed out on the old roads.
Take, as an illustration, the history of one of the world's most heavily traveled stretches of road, the sixteen-mile Detroit-Pontiac Highway. It was in 1 8 1 7 that its right of way was first laid down, consisting of great logs rolled close together and filled in with clay and sand. By mid-century it had become a plank toll road for horses and buggies. In 1 9 1 6 it was rebuilt for the auto- mobile— that is to say, it was paved. But its width remained the same as it had been in 1817 — a mere sixteen feet. Five years later an observer reported "forty-three automobiles stalled on Sunday afternoon on a stretch of the road badly shouldered by dirt and stones and with a menacing ditch at the side." By 1923 traffic on it had bogged down almost entirely. Then the Governor of Michigan started a piecemeal program of widening it to 200 feet. By 1938, 50,000 people used it every day with what at long last became a high rate of safety — its accident-death rate being less than one-third that of the nation as a whole. Ever since 1817, the State of Michigan had meant well. When it was time for teams and buggies, it built a road for teams and buggies. When it was
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time for a railroad, it built a railroad bed. But when it was time for motor cars, it patched the road it had already built for another vehicle. It passed laws, hired policemen and set up traffic lights, but it didn't build a proper road for the automobile. What happened here, as well as all over the country under similar circumstances, was that the precept of "economy" overshadowed those of safety, comfort and speed. Three principles were sacrificed for one. But people found that that didn't work.
Almost at the very start of the automobile era, however, there was one inter- esting exception to this type of highway treatment. In 1906, William K. Van- derbilt II and some cronies who wanted to motor to their Long Island homes at forty miles an hour without scaring horses and infuriating the public, ac- quired a fifty-mile strip of land 100 feet wide down the island from Flushing to Lake Ronkonkoma. On it they built a two-lane wriggling ribbon of con- crete and macadam, on which no carriages were allowed. Because they did not wish to slow down every few hundred yards for a crossroad, they bridged every intersection — which was a brand-new idea. A speed-limitless play- ground for millionaires was only part of this conception. The important thing about this road was its recognition of the fact that the automobile, in order to function at its best, needs a right of way as free from obstacles as a railroad track.
The career of this Long Island Motor Parkway is interesting. Built at a cost of about $7,000,000 ($140,000 per mile) , its original toll charge of one dol- lar per trip in each direction could not keep it from being a financial failure. Non-millionaire drivers, although enjoying the route as being safe and com- fortable and speedy, were aware that instead of being economical it doubled their driving costs over those forty miles. In 1937 the road had to be aban- doned. In this way, the lesson that a road must follow all four principles of safety, comfort, speed and economy indivisibly was again pointed out. And at
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the same time it taught another lesson: that unless an idea is thought through in all particulars, it soon grows obsolete. Private enterprise had spent a lot of money on this road, and proved the point that other existing roads were not properly designed for the motor car. When it was first built, the Long Island Motor Parkway was the country's most advanced road. But neverthe- less, even its designers did not fully appreciate the possibilities of the automobile. Curves on the Parkway were too sharp, there were too many of them, the road was too rolling, and it was too narrow.
The gentlemen who built the Parkway might have had more success if they had listened to the wise advice of W. W. Crosby, who urged in 1903 that, before building a road, a traffic census should be taken to determine in advance how much traffic the road would be required to carry. Again in 1914, Engineer S. Whinery urged that roads should be considered in the light of traffic conditions twenty years in the future. This advice also went unheard. The nation's roads still weren't designed for the future at all. They were improved piecemeal to answer immediate needs.
This failure to heed advice led the country to the highway crisis of 1924, when the number of cars on the road reached over seventeen and a half million and motorists came earnestly face to face with the traffic menace. Progressive young engineers wanted to relieve congestion by replanning the whole road system, but public and officials decided differently. They widened the old roads. They set low speed limits on them. They put up thousands of traffic lights. The old ideals of safety, speed, comfort and economy were now being interpreted to read "go slow." It was a far cry from the day when Mr. Vander- bilt had interpreted them to mean "go fast."
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Gendrea
ONE-WAY CAPACITY ON GRAND CENTRAL PARKWAYS
Acme
COUNTING TRAFFIC AUTOMATICALLY
While the science of road design was thus being held back, the technique of policing and traffic lights was going forward. In the early nineteen hundreds the major duties required of traffic officers were stopping runaway horses and directing parades. As the automobile began to crowd existing roads and no relief in the sense of newly designed highways was in sight, the policeman grew into a major highway figure. He was stationed in the thick of traffic, and began to require assistants to unsnarl the tangled cars. He resorted to signals, whistles, hand and semaphore devices. In 1924 a series of inventions began dotting the country with various systems of mechanical traffic regulation. Although this represented a contribution to safety, it violated the aims of comfort, economy and speed because it was hit-or-miss, restrictive rather than corrective. What was really needed was a properly designed highway system that would make a maze of traffic lights unnecessary.
Today, with a tremendously multiplied volume of traffic, there is an even greater need for such a highway system. The millions of square miles that make up this country's land, all of its industries, its social development, are all completely dependent on the flow of its traffic — the life-blood of the nation. The medium through which this national life-blood is pumped should be an efficient circulatory system of arteries and veins, instead of three million miles of haphazardly improved routes laid out for the different needs of gold-seekers
[30]
Ewing Galloway
in California, of missionaries in the South- west, fur traders and explorers in the North- west, covered- wagon pioneers in the Great Plains, buffaloes in the Middle West and Indians in New England. Our highway "sys- tem" affects the life of each hamlet, city and farm in the United States, and yet it is still regarded as a local matter, to be tinkered with from time to time by state, county and municipality, as if the blood-stream came to a stop at the boundary line.
It took years to get the automobile out of the horseless-carriage stage. The inevitable conclusion is that highways will have to go
through the same upheaval — sooner or later. And it can be done more safely, comfortably and economically if it is done soon. But what has been done so far on the highway, instead of the required upheaval, is a slow process of adaptation which doesn't work. Mr. R. E. Toms, Chief of the Division of Design of the Federal Bureau of Public Roads, once said that twenty years from now motoring will still not be "radically different" from what it is today, that "the familiar two-lane highway is here to stay," and that "you won't see any sweeping changes in highway design for years to come." He says this in spite of the fact that another official in the same Bureau, Mr. H. S. Fair- bank, recently admitted that "no single section of our nationwide system of interstate highways was built for the express use of the automobile." Mr. Fair bank made this statement in 1938, when there were 30,000,000 cars on the road, and when experts were estimating that the next twenty years would double that number. He said this ten years after the installation of the first
[31]
James M. Doolittle
FABLE OF THE SNAIL—
AND THE MOTORIST
Acme
cloverleaf intersection in the country, after the completion of many "super- highways," "freeways," "skyways" and the like, with all their improvements, and still he was able honestly to say that our highways not only are lagging, but are obsolete.
Automobile travel is less efficient in this respect than any other form of travel. Automobile roads are the only transportation routes which are not systematically planned in accordance with the needs of the vehicles which use them. At sea, for instance, sea lanes are planned for ships. There is nothing haphazard about sea traffic. Guesswork has been reduced to a minimum. The "Great Circle Track," the shortest steaming route between Nantucket Light and Bishop's Rock, England, has been carefully divided into traffic lanes. Ships inform each other by radio of bearing and speed. The channels and aids to navigation have been designed not for the vessels of another day, but for the ships that use them now. In air traffic, too, there is similar planning. Control towers at airports eliminate confusion and congestion. Traffic going in op- posite directions is kept apart by regulations allocating it to separate altitudes. The result of this planning is that after a ship has cleared its harbor, or after a plane has climbed to its ceiling, each can proceed to its destination along the best and shortest possible route, without fear of interruption. It can go prac- tically in a straight line. Neither ship nor plane has to use a right of way inherited from some ambling predecessor.
The problems of the railroad are more closely analogous to the problems of the automobile than are those of ship or plane, because both car and train have to travel over land and therefore are subject to inevitable interferences and barriers. But, unlike the highway, the railroad does not give in to this difficulty meekly. In places where financial economy might seem to call for a roundabout route, elaborate engineering is never- theless usually decided upon to cut through the barrier and
[34]
Acme
give a direct route, producing greater economy in the long run. The result is that railroad tracks are a great deal straighter than highways, and that the train, although inherently a clumsy vehicle, is able to travel with far greater comfort, safety, economy and speed than the car.
The present-day automobile functions in competition with high- speed airplanes and locomotives. If there is to be any justification for its existence, it must match them in efficiency. To do this, it is not enough to build an efficient automobile — the route is as important to the vehicle as thread is to a needle. An automobile may be capable of high speed, but when its road prevents it from using that speed in safety and comfort — because of steep grades, sharp curves, dangerous intersections and aimless winding — it is powerless. Therefore, before re-routing, re-designing or improving an old highway, or before laying out a new one, the route should always be examined not from the view- point of tradition or habit, but with a conscious regard for today's automobile traffic. In the days of the horse and buggy, economy was never thought of in terms of time saved or fuel saved. But today that economy is vital, and the elimination of every unnecessary mile or hazard counts.
A properly designed highway follows the most direct route that is available from one point to another; it obeys the old geometric axiom that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. That is a simple, perhaps obvious, statement, and yet if it were really carried out in practice it would completely transform our highway system. It is the first guiding principle that should be considered before any high-
MAN IN FLIGHT— BY JOHN COBB
BIRD IN FLIGHT— BY BRANCUSI
way is constructed, before the first plans for it are made.
Chinese road builders purposely place many turns and twists in their roads, because they believe that evil spirits fly along them and that if the roads are crooked enough the evil ones may miss one of the turns, fly off and get lost. Do American road builders also believe in evil spirits? Judging from their handiwork, the answer is yes. Actually, however, the explanation is of course not so simple. The three main obstacles which stand in the way of proper high- way design today are: first, the difficulties of acquiring a right of way; second, the pressures and pulls that influence the planning of the route; and third, the terrain over which the route must pass. These three factors have acted as stumbling blocks to all road building organizations, whether Federal, state or municipal. But must they be stumbling blocks for all time to come?
Fortunately, against the piecemeal school of highway construction which generally prevails, there are those students of traffic engineering who can be referred to as "forward-looking men." There have been many who sensed that all was not well with the method of American highway development. Perhaps the credit for the first piece of functional traffic engineering in Amer- ica should go to Colonel Stephen H. Long, an army engineer, loaned to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. This man designed and built a new type of truss bridge which carried the Baltimore-to-Washington roads over the railway tracks. Colonel Long named the overpass in honor of Andrew Jackson, then President of the United States. The date was 1830. It was the first attack on the grade crossing.
There were other men who also realized what had to be done. Jay Downer, as Engineer and Executive Secretary of the Bronx Parkway Commission, de- veloped a forty-foot, four-lane highway, eliminated grade crossings, and protected the route from side encroachments. Dr. John A. Harriss did pioneer work on coordinated traffic light systems. Carl Fisher planned the Lincoln
[36]
Highway. Fritz Malcher advanced the "steadyflow" system of traffic. Robert Moses, New York's Commissioner of Parks, has built miles of parkways and the city's Elevated Express Highway.
Various states, too, have seen the alarm signals. New Jersey built the first cloverleaf intersection. Michigan has built highways on the "freeway" prin- ciple. Pennsylvania is building a toll highway which will pierce the Alle- ghenies with nine tunnels, reach heights of 2,500 feet at grades never more than 3 per cent, and maintain a constant highspeed flow with no maximum speed limit, by means of lane segregation, cloverleaf s and long sight-distances.
In short, there are a few good roads in America. But not one of them is a patched-up hand-me-down. If we want safety, comfort, speed and economy in travel we must build it into our roads. We must build roads that are liter- ally, not figuratively, motor roads.
There is one famous right of way in America which has recently been built with these ends in view. Its builders had the advantage of starting from scratch, without the heritage of stagecoaches and horses and buggies to estab- lish precedent, and the success of their venture has proved the desirability of starting from scratch. We
PATTERN FROM AN AIRPLANE— BY ROBERT MOSES WEST SIDE HIGHWAY, NEW YORK
are speaking of the Hud- N. Y. c. Park DePt. son River's Holland Tun- nel.
Actually, there are two tunnels, one in each di- rection. Thus traffic mov- ing in opposite directions is completely segregated, visually and physically. There is no cross traffic.
Even cars driving in the same direction are required to keep in separate lanes, so that there is no weaving in and out and no sideswiping. Cars are not al- lowed to stop. All cars must drive at a constant, uniform speed. Each car must keep a standard safe distance behind the car in front of it. The tunnels are always patrolled — not by roaming traffic cops, but by officers so posted that they can see any mishap or failure and report it at once. A wrecking crew is always on call to remove immediately any disabled vehicle. There is no danger of any car striking a pedestrian, for pedestrians move on separated elevated walkways. The margin of guesswork has been reduced by thorough scientific planning. What such planning means comes home to us when we learn that in this one-and-three-quarter-mile tunnel a fatal accident has occurred only once in 47,000,000 motor vehicle miles. If these conditions could be applied to America's entire highway system, our annual automobile death toll, instead of 32,000 lives, would be less than 6,000.
The case of the four gospels of safety, comfort, speed and economy seems to be one of "many are called, yet few are chosen." No one has dared deny these transportation ideals. Many have heeded their soundness. But relatively few have carried them out. Since these words get more lip service on our highways than actual observance, one cannot do better than repeat and rede- fine them, hoping to drive them home.
SEGREGATED, REGULATED SPEED IN THE HOLLAND TUNNEL
Port of New York Authority
Port of New York Authority
SIMPLE MECHANISM FOR ELIMINATING FLAT TIRES
By safety is meant the safe guiding of the individual along the highway, not necessarily the features which make that safety. By comfort is meant a high degree of ease — though not the ease which is represented by travel in a well-upholstered seat behind a soft-purring, high-powered engine through a jungle of roadhogs, football crowds, bumps, detours and glaring headlights. Comfort must be built into the highway as well as into the automobile. Speed is of course the time it takes to travel, and is achieved not only by building fast-moving automobiles but by laying out highways along the short- est possible distance between two points. Economy must be achieved not only in the financial sense, but in a broader scientific sense: the economy of time and energy as well as of money. And finally, each of these four principles, in order to function fully, has to be combined with the other three. A highway which follows one of these goals at the sacrifice of the other three cannot be an efficient motorway. It may be called a highway — for that term, after all,
[39]
CEILING ZERO
Emanutl M.
means nothing more than that the road is laid along high ground. But it is not a motorway — for that word means a right of way explicitly designed for and adapted to the uses of motor traffic.
The aim of highway engineers in the twentieth century should be to con- struct motorways instead of highways. It is an important task, and an inspir- ing one. It means pioneering, traveling over uncharted territory instead of following in the well-worn paths which tradition has laid down. But just as the horse and buggy have been replaced by the motor car, so must the high- way be replaced by the motorway.
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ELIMINATE THE HUMAN FACTOR IN DRIVING
GRIM PLEASURE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Brown Bros.
w.
'HEN a family took a pleasure spin in the car thirty years ago, elabo- rate preparations were required. Tow ropes, tire-patching outfits, reserve cans of water, oil and gas were provided against the emergency which was likely to happen. A basket luncheon was made ready, to bolster morale when the car broke down in some remote place perhaps fifteen miles from home. Each mem- ber of the family was protected from dust. Women didn't drive cars in those days; but they bundled themselves in mummy-like veils for protection. The head of the family cut an even more formidable figure when he appeared in front of the car. Like his wife, he wore a long linen duster, to which he added a cap that would not blow off, goggles of the largest size and special automo- bile driving gauntlets. Ready to start, the driver approached the car, bent over, put his shoulder firmly against the radiator, mustered up all his strength and spun the crank. Nothing happened. He tried again. If the car backfired, the crank might knock him flat, might break his arm. Any way you looked at it, it was a hazardous matter.
Today, without giving it a thought, the driver steps on the self-starter or
[45]
-
presses the starting button on his instrument panel, and the chore is performed for him. The least possible human effort is involved. No year has passed without the introduction of devices to promote safer and more efficient driving. Automatic wipers sweep across windshields made of non-shatterable glass. High- power electric headlights have replaced the gas and kerosene light of earlier days. Automatic tail lights flash warning when the brakes are applied. Four-wheel brakes stop the car. Steel top and body minimize the damage in case of crash. The irreversible steering wheel and shock absorbers help to make driving steady and easy. Tires are now made puncture proof and skid proof. The car which stands in an automobile showroom today is emi- nently safe and easily adapted to human needs. The purchaser of this car considers it very good indeed, and his confidence that each year's car will be better than last year's model is justified by experience.
But how about the driver? Has he too improved in these thirty years of motor-car experience as the car has improved? Not by any means. He is still, day in, day out, on three million miles of road, the same, as bad a driver as the fellow who drove a Chalmers in 1910. His eyesight is no better, he reacts no faster, he doesn't think any better, he gets drunk just as easily, he is just as absent-minded.
Hard-surfaced roads and closed cars have enabled him to lay aside his ponderous dust-protective costume. Today he may never take the wrenches out of his tool kit from one year's end to another. The car that he drives can go three times as fast as the one he had before. Traffic volume has multiplied a hundredfold.
Above: 1905 Below: 1940
A vast variety of constantly new road situations flash upon him, each of which he must be ready to solve. To keep pace with the machine he manages, he should be able each year to see more clearly, think more quickly and act faster than ever before. His car has been entirely remodeled. His highway is being remodeled. How can the driver be remodeled?
Thirty years ago the worst problem a driver ever encountered was the maxi- mum speed of a runaway horse — and there was practically no congestion problem. Yet even then he had troubles in handling his vehicle. Today the situation is far worse, because he is still the same human being, and yet he has to handle both increased traffic congestion and increased speeds.
No two drivers can be counted upon to behave alike. At the outset that illustrates the seriousness of the problem. Nothing magnifies the difference between individual reactions more than motoring. Even the same man faced with the identical situation at different times will react differently, due to countless factors within himself. Nervousness, irritability and quirks of char- acter so slight that they ordinarily pass unnoticed become positive dangers at motor speeds. Absent-mindedness, which may have no more serious conse- quences at the breakfast table than for a man to look up and ask his wife "What did you say, dear?" may make him forget to give proper hand signals as he drives to work, with cars crowding close behind. A trivial quarrel linger- ing in his mind may dominate his thoughts at the moment a child runs out in the street ahead of him in pursuit of a rolling glass marble.
Long after childhood has passed, men still act on impulse. Sheer exuberance one pleasant morning may make a driver try to round a curve at a speed which hurls him off the road for good. Or, in pursuit of his own glass marble —some bit of business or golf — he will hurry along, bluffing for the right of way until he comes up against another of his own kind. Like the child running out in the path of a moving car, no driver expects trouble. It comes as a com-
[47]
plete surprise, in a moment of impatience or inattention or unpreparedness. Or perhaps it comes when the driver, superhumanly alert and well within his rights, is struck by another driver who is superhumanly careless. It makes lit- tle difference except to a coroner's jury, whether one driver, or both, or neither was at fault. As the old epitaph puts it,
IT TAKES ONLY ONE TO MAKE AN ACCIDENT
Underwood & Underwood
"Here lies the body of William Jay Who died maintaining his right of way. Will was dead right as he sped along But he's just as dead as though he'd been wrong."
Human nature itself, unaided, does not make for efficient driving. Human beings, even when at the wheel, are prone to talk, wave to their friends, make love, day-dream, listen to the radio, stare at striking billboards, light cigarettes, take chances. They would not be very human if they abandoned these prac- tices even while driving, but in the brief instant it takes to light a cigarette, many drivers' thoughts have been rudely deflated from the road into eternity.
Even when the driver is in full command of the situation, concentrating his
[48]
whole attention on the highway and the problems of driving, he cannot act instantaneously. Confronted with an emergency, he jams on the brakes. Traveling at twenty miles an hour along a clear, dry road, his car requires forty-four feet to come to a stop. Its actual braking distance on that road and at that speed is twenty-two feet. What accounts for the other, possibly fatal
General Motors
THE PROVING GROUND DRIVER AND—
twenty- two? The driver is not sluggish, but he is average and human, and has a normal reaction time of three-quarters of a second. And in that fraction of a second a car going twenty miles an hour travels twenty- two feet. This frac- tion of a second represents the time actually consumed between the instant
BM
Portland Cement Assn.
THE AVERAGE DRIVER HAVE THE SAME MARGIN OF SAFETY
his eyes see the danger and the moment he applies his foot to the brakes. Three- quarters of a second is an average value for this period of delay. For many drivers it is a longer interval, and for a few drivers a shorter one.
Increase the driver's speed to fifty miles an hour, a more usual rate on the open road. His reaction time does not change, but during this three-quarters-
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of-a-second interval a car traveling at that speed will have covered fifty-five feet, and will require a distance of almost two hundred feet to come to a stop. As the speed of the car is increased, the distance required to stop the car in- creases correspondingly, due to the increased distance which the car will travel during the three-quarters-of-a-second reaction-time interval, plus the in- creased distance required for the brakes to bring the faster-moving car to a stop after they have been applied.
Besides the general human characteristics which are common to all automo- bile operators, there are also individual failings which are not conducive to safe driving. A driver may have defective eyesight. One or two of every five motorists share this handicap. Worse, and very probably, he doesn't know that he has it. His limitation may take the form of being unable to see objects "out of the corner" of his eye. His field of vision may be so restricted that he sees things as though viewing them through a tunnel.
Or he may just have been drinking. No two authorities quite agree on the point at which a person who has been drinking becomes a danger, but one esti- mate, based on state surveys for 1937, declared that 8 per cent of all drivers and 1 3 per cent of all pedestrians involved in fatal accidents had been drinking. Whether these were unable to walk a straight line or speak the English language properly, or whether they merely had alcohol on their breath, is not clear. Tests made in a Milwaukee hospital show that, under the influence of alcohol, drivers' reaction time and consequent braking distance were increased by 3 0 per cent, that their eye and muscular coordination was 40 per cent poorer than normal, and that they made 60 per cent more errors than drivers completely sober.
The driver may have no physical ailments, but he may be a mental specimen of the type that regards the road as a sort of athletic field on which he can show off. Left unsatisfied by his humdrum daily existence, he may use high- way conquests and victories over opposing cars as a means to blow up his ego.
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He may be merely bull- headed, or on the other hand timid, or he may be —and very few drivers' license tests manage to discover this — definitely subnormal. In any case he is an unreliable factor to have in control of a car.
Carelessness is another
human failing common to SAFER THAN THE AVERAGE MOTORIST
many drivers. Over-confidence or boredom often produces lack of attention in an experienced driver, due to the monotony of a long or familiar trip. He may be day-dreaming when an object suddenly looms up ahead causing him to obey a reflex and become tense. If he has his foot on the accelerator, this im- pulse follows a pattern contrary to the muscular coordination and reflex action which are required in such a situation. It may tend not toward self- preservation but toward self-destruction. Or, finally, a driver's health may be excellent and his judgment clear, when suddenly he is faced with a complex road emergency that transcends all his experience. He is holding a hurtling instrument in his hands. Quick action and lightning precision are demanded of him. Yet something inside him clamps down — he freezes, helpless. It is — panic.
Today's driver is the same unpredictable fellow he was in the days of the Chalmers. The automobile may have dispensed with the whipstock which ap- peared on early models, but drivers have not rid themselves of impulses which have been part of them from time immemorial. True, training by continual automobile driving is perhaps quickening the reaction time of man as a species, but these reactions of his cannot be depended upon. Man is not a machine
and he cannot be geared to function automatically as part of any machine.
Cities and states have tried to keep the driver up to date by means of legisla- tion. They have commanded him to overcome his known limitations and to drive with robot-like precision. When he sets off from Jacksonville along the 350 miles to Miami, he is confronted with 6,760 signs on the way, telling him what to do and what not to do. They remind him of Prohibition. He becomes irritated at the heckling, moralizing free advice. He feels little guilt in evading them when he can. Each time he crosses a state line he becomes subject to a new, often unfamiliar and conflicting set of commandments. In this way, con- ditions are created when even an upright citizen becomes a law breaker. Signs drill into his eyes the one injunction: "Drive slowly." He is not fooled. He knows that this is a complete contradiction. Cars are built for safe, fast trans- portation. Although he may be unfamiliar with President Cleveland's graceful phrase about letting the law "pass into innocuous desuetude," he treats it with the same respect as another law still on the statute books: "It is not permitted in New York City to open an umbrella in the presence of a horse."
Most traffic control seems merely to try to restrict man's inalienable right to be killed at street crossings, not to aid him constructively in the pursuit of motoring happiness. It regards the motorist as a rugged individualist on whom certain checks and balances must be imposed in the form of red lights and police whistles. The control measures have been designed only to meet certain given situations, leaving many accidents within the law. For instance, in spite of the safety command to "go slow," 90 per cent of all accidents occur at com- paratively low speeds. And in spite of all the rules on what to do and what not to do, nine out of ten accidents are caused, not by a mechanical failure, but by human failure.
The inference seems clear: as long as there is opportunity to make a mistake, some driver will make it. As long as there are roads on which emergencies can
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arise, just so long will there be drivers who fail to meet them. The present-day trend as to how to remove the risk due to the human factor is to restrict the driver. Everything is leaning toward greater restrictions as to who may drive a car, the speed at which a car may be driven, and other considerations of that nature. Authorities are trying to give more severe examinations to the driver, to make sure that only "good men" will be selected. But more severe drivers' examinations cannot produce much greater road safety. Examinations never reveal anything. Even if only the best 10 per cent of drivers were allowed to drive there would still be accidents, because this 10 per cent would at some time or other be less able to drive than it was at the time when it was tested. Tests can only reveal how an individual acts and thinks at a given moment under special circumstances — not how he acts and thinks day in and day out under a variety of different situations. In short, more severe examinations will not solve the problem. Legislating against the driver will not improve his inherent characteristics. Restricting speed is not going to solve the problem. Variable factors in the human being cannot be regulated.
It is ridiculous, for example, to pass a law saying that when one driver meets another car he must dim his lights, when this action can be achieved by me- chanical means independent of the driver. The use of automatically controlled light which keeps the oncoming glare from the driver's eyes is one way of achieving the desired effect — and there are no buttons which someone must remember to push. A mechanical solution is bound to be more satisfactory than a psychological or legal solution because it regulates not only those drivers who are cooperative, intelligent and law-abiding, but all drivers.
Other forms of transportation have done a great deal in eliminating the human factor. Railroads have developed the automatic block system in which the railway track is divided into "blocks" or sections. The rails are wired so that as the wheels of one train pass over electrical contact points, the presence
RAILWAY ENGINEERS CAN'T MAKE MISTAKES
New York Central Railroad
of a train within that block is automatically signaled to the next block. Should a second train enter the next block while the first train occupies the block ahead, the second train would receive a "caution" signal. If the second train passes through its block before the first train has passed out of that block, the second train may be automatically stopped. Upon the first train advancing to another block, a "clear" signal flashes for the second train, indicating that it is now safe to proceed.
The locomotive engineer is not likely to make a mistake as a result of wrong judgment. Neither is there danger of accident due to sudden absent-minded- ness or physical failure. A device known as the "dead man's stick" automati- cally brings a train to a safe halt if the engineer's hand falls from the controls. An efficient system of automatic signals keeps him thoroughly acquainted with the situation ahead of him, informs him of emergencies which are not visible to the human eye.
Present-day lack of automobile safety control cannot be excused on the
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grounds that the automotive industry is younger than the railroad, because the youngest of all transport facilities, the air line, also uses a number of mechanical safety devices. Airplanes utilize the radio beam and plane-to-plane and plane- to-field radio telephone. These controlling devices have one thing in common, the conjunctive operation of the right of way and vehicle. Yet even with these automatic devices, train engineers and air pilots are still carefully selected and trained for their jobs.
Travel by automobile is more than twenty-five times as great as by train, and more than seven hundred and fifty times as great as by air. Yet it is only the trains and airplanes that carry mechanical controls to provide auto- matic aid for their drivers. Radio beams, block systems and other devices could be applied to the automobile, not exactly, but in general principle.
In the motor car itself much has been done in the last twenty years. The phenomenal -nature of these advances makes one think that the advances in the next twenty years will be even quicker and greater than anything that has been done so far. The engine may be moved from the present location to a place under the floor or in the rear, giving many improvements, including improved vision and the possibility of building a more resilient and safe bumper at the front of the car. It will have a higher speed and it will be used at that speed. No driver always drives at full speed, but he will use that speed as freely on the proper roads as he now uses twenty-five at best on a crowded highway. Tires will be made resistant to the effects of heat, oil and gasoline so that they can withstand the higher speeds of twenty years from now as they withstand the present-day driving speed. Cars will be smaller but roomier. Interiors will be more flexible as to use. They will be air conditioned. Cars will be more comfortable to ride in, more economical to run, and capable of higher speed. But none of these improvements will mean a thing if there is not a corresponding advance in safety. Given a 1960 automobile, with its
Portland Cement Assn.
ONE PLUS ONE MAKES TWO BUT TWO PLUS TWO MAKES THREE
tremendous technical advances and capabilities, the 1940 driver would prob- ably find it simply a more economical and quicker way to get himself into a smash-up.
But with the changes in the car, will the driver too be changed? Will he have lost one bad trait which made him years ago a menace to his own safety and a nuisance to others? Don't count on it. But these cars of 1960 and the highways on which they drive will have in them devices which will correct the faults of human beings as drivers. They will prevent the driver from com- mitting errors. They will prevent his turning out into traffic except when he should. They will aid him in passing through intersections without slowing down or causing anyone else to do so and without endangering himself or others. Many present beginnings give hints of the kind of over- all planning on which the near future could realize. Everything will be designed by engineer- ing, not by legislation, not in piecemeal fashion, but as a complete job. The two, the car and the road, are both essential to the realization of automatic safety. It is a job that must be done by motor-car manufacturers and road builders cooperatively. Such devices when adopted will not be included in just this car or that. They would do no good just here and there. They will be obligatory for all cars. They will prevent a car from turning out of a lane except under favorable circumstances. They will prevent him from moving
[56]
i Electric
AUTOMATIC CAR CONTROL WOULD AID THE SAFE DRIVER AND CURB THE BAD DRIVER
Gendreau
from one highway artery into another until his speed has been brought up or down to the rate of the new artery he is to enter. They will safeguard traffic lanes from right or left interference. They will make it possible for him to proceed at full speed through dense fog. They will aid him as he travels at night, as he crosses mountain ranges, as he traverses the breadth of the country and as he drives through city streets.
In 1940 many people felt that those drivers who blundered ought to be driven off the highway. But since almost everyone at some time blundered— indeed, couldn't help blundering, given such a set-up of unworkable laws and obsolete roads — that demand was much too difficult ever to be carried out. It usually worked out in the sense that the blunderers drove themselves off the highways — into the ditch. But in 1960 they all stay out of the ditch. It is not done by law, but through the very nature of the car and the highway. They still blunder, of course, but when they do, they are harmless.
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SEPARATED LANES OF TRAFFIC
AVE you ever conceived of a road which would allow no car to approach your own — which would hold you to your course without the danger of be- ing struck or of striking any object — where you could decide in advance how fast you would like to drive, and by maintaining that constant, effortless pace, arrive at your destination on scheduled time? It sounds impossible? But you can have such a road. The means of bringing it about are available. The idea is thoroughly practical. It can be built to work in conjunction with an auto- matic control installed in your car. The highway you use can be made as safe and pleasant at all times as it would be if your car were the only automobile upon it.
Today, in the course of an average mile drive through traffic, your automo- bile is exposed to several hundred cars, moving in every direction and at every variation in speed from ten to seventy miles an hour. In this disorderly traffic flow, there can be no certainty that one car of all those hundreds will not meet you head-on, crash in behind you or suddenly lash against the side of your car. It is not only the accident, but the fear of accident, which retards
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TRAFFIC TUNED TO THE TEMPO OF GENTLER TIMES
Henry Flam
r^r
NEW YORK CITY TRAFFIC CONTROL
Margaret Bourke-White
SOFT SHOULDERS
the effective use of the motor car. Wherever there is danger, traffic is forced to go slowly, which causes delay, congestion, exasperated drivers, more acci- dents. The highway attributes that produce accidents are four in number. They are known to everyone.
First: The crossroad. Here two crossing streams of traffic using the same pavement cause the greatest congestion on the highway today. This problem will be discussed in the next chapter.
Second: The road edge. Stationary hazards at the roadside, such as soft shoulders, culverts, fences, hydrants, telephone poles, parked cars, as well as moving objects, such as jay-walkers or stray dogs wandering onto the high- way, cause motorists to crowd inward away from them and thus slow down traffic.
Third: Cars moving in opposite directions. This with its head-on collisions results in more fatal accidents than any other type.
Fourth: Cars moving in the same direction but at different speeds. This is an important cause of retardation of traffic flow and is the greatest cause of automobile accidents. It results in rear-end collisions and the sideswiping of two cars in adjacent lanes.
HEAD-ON HAZARD
Port.and Cement Assn. ™REE SPEEDS AHEAD
Portland Cement Assn.
Ewing Galloway
Dr. Miller McClintock, Director of the Yale University Bureau for Street Traffic Research, who devised the audit count which has become the basis of many American city traffic patterns, has aptly expressed these four factors which retard the smooth flow of traffic in the following terms: At crossroads: intersectional friction. At the road edge: marginal friction.
Between cars moving in opposite directions: medial friction. Between cars moving in the same direction: internal-stream friction. When cars could travel at only ten miles an hour, it was not a serious incon- venience if they held each other up. But when they can travel at present-day speeds, it is serious, unfair, uneconomical and dangerous. It is only now — when speed is here to stay — that it has become necessary to correct the various kinds of interference.
Prior to the automobile era, when animal-drawn carts and foot traffic traveling on single-lane dirt roads met another vehicle traveling in the op- posite direction, each pulled half way off the road to facilitate passing. With the introduction of the automobile, due to the faster speeds involved, a differ- ent type of right of way was demanded, a highway permitting clear travel in two directions simultaneously. The simplest type of such a road is two lanes in opposite directions. On a two-lane road one car overtaking another traveling
in the same direction is expected to pass by pulling over into the lane of opposing traffic. This was adequate at first, when there were few cars, but today at mod- el ern road speeds, the intrusion of an au- < 1 tomobile moving in one direction into a
«
-o line of cars moving in another direction
JH
I is a matter of life or death. In spite of
98% OF U. S. ROADS INVITE THE HEAD-ON
this peril, many state highways in the United States are still only two lanes wide — not just a great number or large majority, but by actual count 9 8 per cent.
Where traffic is heavy, the general practice has been to add more lanes. The unhappy fact is that ADDING LANES MULT'PLIES ACCIDENTS the mere widening of roads tends to promote accidents rather than prevent them. Traffic studies indicate that for an equal number of miles traveled there are only three accidents on a two-lane road to every four accidents on the wider highways. Three-lane highways, where cars fly at each other like game cocks battling for use of the center lane, are particularly tempting for head-on collisions. To eliminate this danger, on highways widened to four and six lanes physical separation of opposing streams of traffic is a recent development. Such two-way divided roads are an obvious improvement over the three-lane undivided roads. But such physical division is the exception rather than the rule, and in its absence, the accident rate increases as the number of lanes is increased. Mid-road collisions cause nearly one-fifth of all accidents on the highway. Four years ago, Mr. H. C. Dickinson of the National Bureau of Standards said: "We should never have built, and should stop building now, main country thoroughfares carrying heavy traffic in both directions on the same pavement."
Segregating opposing streams of traffic by means of the one-way street is common practice. Nor is it a modern idea. The Romans did it. Today this
[65]
Underwood & Underwoc
California State Highway Dept.
venerable practice survives and still proves its worth. Studies made on Chestnut, Walnut and Market Streets in Philadelphia, before and after their conversion to one-way arteries, show that speed is increased by more than 20 per cent, that traffic volume is increased by more than 20 per cent, and that accidents be- tween intersections have been materially reduced.
Through the countryside, one-way roads would be equally desirable, but they cannot be achieved as simply as one-way streets within a city. Closely parallel routes with frequent inter- connections are limited to the cities, and the arbitrary conver- sion of country roads into one-way traffic channels would work a hardship on local traffic.
The first step toward separating streams of traffic on the exist- ing rural highways was taken in 1911, after Edward Hines, Road Commissioner of Wayne County, Michigan, saw an automobile almost collide with a horse and buggy on a narrow bridge. Real- izing that neither driver involved could do more than make a guess as to where the exact center of the road lay, Mr. Hines ordered white lines painted down the middle of every bridge and curve under his authority. Later he extended these lines along the full length of his paved roads. That was nearly thirty years ago. Today an assortment of solid lines, double lines, dotted lines,
Above: SAFETY THROUGH RAISED ARROWS Below: SAFETY THROUGH PAINT Acme
ROUGH GOING FOR TRESPASSERS
Portland Cement Assn. '
dashes and arrows, painted white, yellow or black divide the highways. =
<
This practice marks an advance in safety, but it is not a guarantee. 1
• Good drivers like to know where the middle of the road is, in order to ^
JS
stay away from it. But bad drivers, the road hog, the novice, the drunk, I the show-off, and all that reckless tribe, are inclined to straddle the mark. Some, with a phobia against the road's edge, hug the line so closely that they sideswipe cars to the left of them.
The neutral strip used for central division on wider roadways is in effect a mere broadening of the painted line. From three and a half to four feet in width, such a strip is frequently laid in contrasting colors of material to differentiate it from that part of the road devoted to traffic lanes.
Lanes themselves have also been laid down in contrasting road sur- faces. "Psychology" road design has been tried on the highway between Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia; in Rhode Island on the Putnam Pike, Gooseneck Hill Road; on the Boston Post Road and others. On these four-lane roads, light-colored smooth cement lanes have been built on either side of a central paving of coarse- textured black mac- adam. The macadam is wide enough for two additional lanes and a three- foot neutral strip which is marked off by white lines. No one wants to hear the roar of his tires over the rough-surfaced macadam for an appreciable distance if he can help it, so drivers keep away from the center of the road except when passing. There were twenty-seven ac- cidents on the Putnam Pike in 1936, before the center of the road was rough-paved, and only eight accidents in the year afterwards.
J?
On many California roads, arrow-shaped protuberances have been 1= set in a line along the middle of the road} not sufficiently high to present «
c
a hazard but making continuous driving in the center of the road dis- 1
Above: SAFETY THROUGH PSYCHOLOGY Below: BARS FOR INSOMNIA
tinctly uncomfortable. A similar drastic inducement to keep the center strip free for emergencies is a series of raised domes. These devices undoubtedly serve a safety purpose, but it is a curious paradox that road builders should deliberately design discomfort into heavily traveled highways.
Still another type of central divider, which takes up no more space than the painted line already used for marking off one-way traffic, has been tried on Ramona Boulevard in Los Angeles. Convex metal bands mounted on steel springs at the height of a hub-cap had already proved strong and resilient when used as roadside guard rails. Two such convex metal bands mounted on steel springs were bolted back to back and mounted on steel posts in the center of the Boulevard, making it impossible for cars to cross over onto the opposing lanes. Near Lansing, Michigan, a strip of cor- rugated steel has been laid down the center of the road, with slanting grooves so designed that they grip the wheels of an encroaching car and turn it back onto its lane of the highway.
Devices of this type are possible, however, only on wide roadways with room for at least two lanes on each side of the road, so that no car need ever cross over into opposing streams of traffic. And they do not pre- vent a car that is out of control from crashing across the road.
On a few thoroughfares there has been one masterly
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TRAFFIC SEPARATION REDUCES DEATH FOUR-FIFTHS
Portland Cement Assn.
CARELESS DRIVING HERE SETS A BATH
improvement in design. It is the first real step toward motorways on which cars can move in safety at the speed for which they were built. On about .one- fifth of the 3,303 miles of four- and six-lane roads in our state highway systems, the road is now divided by something more effective than painted lines and bumpy arrows. Raised islands have been introduced on many roads which provide a real barrier between streams of opposing traffic. Highways with central division of this sort were first tried out around large cities, nota- bly Detroit, in 1925. As late as 1931, they were not widely favored by high- way engineers, but now they are generally considered to have proven their worth, despite the fact that their average cost is a third greater than that of the undivided four-lane highway. In a mile-long stretch of highway on Chi- cago's Outer Drive, where this type of division is used, the fatal accident rate for four years has been only one in every forty million vehicle miles, which is one-fifth the accident rate of the nation as a whole.
The central division of two-way thoroughfares, then, varies all the way from the painted line to wide parkways planted with shrubbery to screen off one side of the road from the other. The best central parkway divisions have low, sloping arched curbs, tending to slow down cars which are forced off the
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roadway by any emergency, and thus making it easier to stop them safely.
The outside edge of the road presents dangers that must also be eliminated. One of the earliest devices used to prevent vehicles from encroaching on pedes- trian walkways is the simple curb. But as a roadside guard for motor traffic, it is too rigid and unyielding. More resilient roadside guards have long been employed along curves and embankments, and have proved more effective in holding cars on the road. Convex metal bands and steel cable strung between concrete posts are in common use. Wide grass strips along the right of way of many new boulevards provide safety for a car forced off the road surface by an emergency, and enable it to park without blocking the lane.
There are other elements of traffic which must be separated too. It is not enough just to separate traffic moving in opposite directions. To prevent cars weaving from lane to lane and to eliminate sideswiping, lanes of cars moving in the same direction must be divided one from another. Separators which re- quire an appreciable amount of road space are unsuited to segregating individ- ual lanes. Experiments have been conducted with many types that are suffi- ciently compact to be practical for lane division.
Four or five years ago, ruts were built into the Queensboro Bridge in New York City, but they were so ineptly designed that the experiment was aban- doned after a few days. The fault was one of design — the spacing between ruts was wrong, so that considerable damage was done to tires, and the width of the ruts was too close to tire width so that unless the driver was practiced at driving in these particular ruts he continually burned the sidewall of one tire or another. Raised portions along the center part of the lane, which the car must straddle, have been tried, too, in an attempt to keep cars in a partic- ular lane. These humps, ruts or rails are attempts to provide for the automo- bile tracks which are as restricting as railroad tracks are to the train. They are experimental types and not always successful, but at least they point in the
[70]
jjk ',
•
Gendreau
HORSE SENSE BUILT THIS NATURAL SIDE BARRIER
right direction, toward methods of segregating individual lanes of traffic.
A more practical solution to this problem might be found just by looking at the simplest of our roads. People who have lived on the land will remember that on dirt roads which had been worn down below the level of the fields by travel it was difficult for even a runaway horse to crash with its buggy into a rail fence up above. The chance angle of roadside slope would automatically turn the buggy's wheels back onto the road. If something desir- able can happen by chance, why shouldn't it be made to function even better by design? Suppose that the edge of a modern con- crete highway did not stop, as it often does, in a declivity or soft shoulder, but was curved up at either side. Any car out of con- trol would be automatically turned back onto the road, if the curve were properly designed. The upward curving edge of the road itself could effectively serve both as safety device and separator.
Many devices of this sort have been patented. Some separators are designed in the form of a wave crest, running along the sides
of the road. As a runaway car climbs up toward the under side
•
of the wave's crest, its wheels are deflected back onto the straight < H HER
^, . ,. .. METAL ADAPTATION OF
course. 1 his type or separator could be built of steel mesh woven SIDE BARRIER
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in basket-weave fashion. It could be made of concrete, built as part of the road itself. It could be of prefabricated sheet-metal construction. More flexi- ble materials would lessen the shock in turning the car back to its channel.
Separators can prevent sideswiping and head-on accidents, but as long as there are cars moving at different speeds in the same lane of traffic there will be delay and the danger of rear-end collision. Attempts have been made to separate passenger cars from trucks by forbidding the heavier vehicles to use certain highways; but this does not make for a larger and more efficient use of
our roadways. The motor truck and the motor car are capable of maintaining
i
comparable speed, and as long as a truck can move fast enough to keep out of
the way of the car behind it, there seems to be no more valid reason for sepa- rating it from the passenger car than there would be for separating red cars from blue ones. The traffic problem will not be solved by setting aside one road for larger vehicles and another for small ones. All that need be expected of any motor vehicle using the highway is that it stay out of the way of other cars. This involves a question of speed, not of size.
In a large percentage of accidents, high speed is not the primary factor, though it may greatly increase their intensity. In the last eleven years, the maximum speeds at which passenger cars can travel have been increased by 5 0 per cent, and there is no indication that a top limit has been approached. Per- missible speeds on the highways lag far behind the effective speed of a car. Disregarding the question of highway intersection, the subject discussed in the next chapter, if cars could be kept apart, traveling in each lane at uniform speeds, with physical separation between the lanes and automatic control be- tween cars to provide equal spacing, cars could travel with safety at much greater speeds than they do today. Although many states have established maximum speed limits, and twenty-two states have legislation concerning driv- ing at unreasonably low speeds, few attempts have been made to fix definitely
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the speed of automobiles on any given highway or in any particular lane of any highway. To be effective such restrictions must be absolute, and they should not be enforced by law, but automatically. Legislation which permits the driver to apply his own initiative could not be made sufficiently rigid.
Automatic controls have already been provided to govern certain factors of traffic operation. The most common of these is perhaps the automatic traffic-light system. And it is not a much greater engineering undertaking to develop controls which can be made to provide definite speed standardiza- tion on the highway. Photo-electric traffic traps are individual means used today for measuring traffic speed, which is merely the first step toward con- trol. William A. Halstead is developing a small short-range radio broadcasting unit which has as its primary purpose the instruction of traffic. This unit located along the highway can broadcast messages to motorists through their standard car radio equipment for the particular section of the highway cov- ered by the transmitter station. The transmitter repeats the traffic bulletins automatically, and these bulletins may be instantly changed at the transmitter or by telephone from a central traffic station. Experiments are being con- ducted with a cable along the highway, from which messages emanate. The same mechanism could transmit visual traffic light signals directly to minia- ture signal lights within the car. Further developments of this system along the lines of car-to-car radio hook-up might be used to advise a driver nearing an intersection of the approach of another car or even to maintain control of speed and spacing of cars in the same traffic lane.
In essentials, the methods of controlling traffic which have been described here provide for a restricted right of way in the form of individual traffic lanes, and for the standardization of the speeds of cars within each of these lanes. Here we have a direct comparison to the railroad. The tracks provide definite control as to the path which a train must follow, and the railroad
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signal block system controls spacing between trains on the same track or traffic lane. These devices could be applied directly to the control of automo- bile traffic. A road surface constructed with grooves in which the car would be guided would prevent the car from deviating from its fixed lane of travel. Also, the highway could be divided into signal blocks acting to prevent the cars from encroaching upon one another. However, applying such control means to automobile traffic becomes too restrictive and prevents the full utilization of the benefits of the automobile which come from the car's flexi- bility. Nor is such a control system applicable to the characteristic operations of the automobile.
Within the field of science there are many potential devices which could be developed to fit exactly the needs of traffic control as they have been defined here. One of these, for instance, the radio beam, is now being used in a limited form for the guiding of the airplane on its course. The field of electro- magnetic emanations, which cover a very wide field of electric-wave impulses, is probably the best adapted to the control of traffic. It is conceivable that a
PLANE PILOT SETS DOT DASH OR DASH DOT SIGNAL IF NOT ON COURSE. ALONG THE BLACK LINE
SIGNALS COMBINE TO CAUSE A STEADY HUM United Airlines
control operating directly — as a radio beam, broad- cast from stations located along the highway — could provide the control desired. Or perhaps more simply, an electrical con- ductor imbedded within the road surface, carrying an electric current pro- ducing an electro-mag- netic field, might provide direct control.
Having provided a con- trol medium, whatever its form, it is logical to ex- pect that this medium ONE MAN GUIDES HUNDREDS OF TRAINS SAFELY could be applied to control both the speed of the car and its path of travel. A constant prescribed speed on the highway can be maintained by causing the impulses to accelerate or decelerate the car engine. By the same method the in- terval between cars can be set and controlled. The interval would be set to conform with the safe stopping distance necessary for the speed of the car. The individual instructions for each car would be transmitted over the control axis. Therefore, we have within one control medium the ability to maintain these cars within a lane and to maintain them at a uniform standardized speed. Also it would not be necessary to widen highways to set up this type of invisible separator and control, as it would be with physical separators. This automatic control of a car could not be put into the car alone or into the
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New York Central Railroad
INDIRECT TRANSITION LANE
ENTRANCE TO TRANSITION LANES
LOW SPEED LANES
highway, alone. The major part will be in the car, but its complementary elements must be in the highway.
Whether lanes of traffic are segregated by physical sepa- rators or by some type of automatic mechanism, lanes within the highway will be designed to permit traffic operation at specified, con- trolled speeds. In the case of multi-lane highways, it is con- ceivable that a certain lane may be designed for high- speed travel and other lanes for a lower speed. All the ad- vanced features of highway design will be incorporated in
Norman Bel Geddes. 1935 TRANSITION FROM ONE SPEED TO ANOTHER— TOMORROW
multi-lane motorways.
Separate strips of motorway will be constructed for traffic flowing at different specific speeds.
The automatically controlled motorway will provide for low, medium and high speeds, and those speeds will be mechanically enforced so that there will be no variation from them. Separate lanes within these strips will allow traffic to move at controlled speeds. When you drive, you choose your lane accord- ing to how fast you want to go, and the speed is automatically maintained as long as you are in that lane. The miles fly by under your wheels. Nothing
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short of an unforeseen emergency will permit you to slow down. No chicken or pedestrian can stray in from the roadside. The motorway is designed ex- clusively for the motorist. Others will be kept off by physical barriers, and physical or electro-magnetic separators hold you to a carefree, undeviating course down the center of your lane.
When you desire to drive in a faster or slower speed lane, a means is pro- vided for transferring from one speed to another. At transition points, lo- cated at regular intervals on the motorway, the grass space between groups of speed lanes is broadened out. In this space is a single-lane cross-over channel that permits a gradual approach from one speed lane to another. It is long enough to allow your car to accelerate or decelerate to the speed of the lane to which you are changing. Before the transition point is reached, you press a button on your instrument panel, indicating that you want to turn left or right into the next lane, just as today you press a button on your radio to tune in on a station of a particular wave length. When your car reaches the en- trance to the cross-over channel, the controlling device in your car picks up and is guided by the controlling forces from the cross-over channel, switching the car from the straight-through lane into this channel. Once on this lane, the control gradually brings you to the speed of the new lane in which you are to travel. Similarly your car is switched into the new lane at the junc- tion between it and the cross-over.
Temporarily there may be no space avail- able on that lane because of traffic density. When such a condition exists, your car, start- ing to travel on the cross-over, is switched into a lane running between the two groups
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TRANSITION FROM ONE SPEED TO ANOTHER— TODAY
Futurama Photo by General Motors
MULTI-DECK MOTORWAYS COULD USE THE TOP OF A GREAT POWER DAM
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of speed lanes and parallel to them. On this you slow down or stop, until re- ceiving a "clear" signal, then accelerate and enter the higher- or lower-speed traffic lane. Any delay encountered occasionally at a point like this is more than compensated for by the steady, even pace you are able to maintain once you are in your desired speed lane. And, of course, there may be no delay at all. If the lane is clear, you enter the new lane without stopping.
Whether you are shifting from low speed to medium, medium to high, or from the higher speeds to the lower, this same procedure is followed. And as you enter a lane, you never have to jam frantically on your brakes, fearing that as you emerge into the traffic stream a car may come hurtling at you. When the automatic controls allow you to make the shift, you make it with perfect safety. Once in the lane, cars move ahead, behind and on either side of you, but automatic lane separation and spacing make it impossible for an- other car to collide with you, sideswipe you or cut in ahead of you. Car-to-car or station-to-car control keeps the automobile behind you at its proper dis- tance. You do not need to use your horn (with which your car is equipped for local roads) on this motorway, because you never have to pass a car. You cannot go faster. The car ahead of you cannot slow down. The car in front moves on at the same speed as your own because both cars are traveling at the automatically prescribed speed within that lane. Before you the road is always clear, as far as you need to use it.
At regular intervals along the motorway there are traffic control sta- tions. These may be located about five miles apart. The officers in each tower have complete authority over the section of road two and a half miles on either side of them. From their vantage point they can see the traffic flowing past them, and with their instruments they can communicate with any car in the territory under their jurisdiction.
Suppose that on this motorway you run out of gas or have engine failure
[79]
CONTROL BRIDGE: OCEAN LINER STYLE
Kurt Sell
Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
CONTROL BRIDGE: FUTURE MOTORWAY STYLE
or a pump leak. A slowing down or stopped car automatically notifies the two nearest traffic control towers. From either control tower the stopped car could probably be seen. It is within two and a half miles of one or the other tower. It takes the cars in front of you about six minutes to clear the two and a half miles. Cars behind the stopped car would be turned off into other lanes of traffic if adjacent lanes were not at capacity. An emergency car from
[81]
the control tower would immediately speed down the new open lane and would remove your car from traffic. Stoppage of traffic in this lane would affect a minimum of cars for a maximum of ten minutes. No glass would be shattered, no cars crumpled, no blood shed, no lives taken.
A motorway of this type, permitting constant high speeds, lies in the near future. But the ability to travel in this manner already lies in your car today. It is simply that disorderly, congested traffic on roads originally designed for wagons prevents the car from utilizing its potentialities. But functional road design will cure this situation.
[82]
EVERY HIGHWAY INTERSECTION IS OBSOLETE
F A psychiatrist were set to work examining all the occupational neuroses of the motorist, it might take him years to do the cataloguing. But any driver can investigate his own lost temper, jagged nerves and week-end nightmares. Just put him on the open road and he will give his diagnosis without further delay. Wiping his brow he will admit that the cause is not complex or far to seek; its name is simply "frustration."
The old phrase, "the open road," always had a pleasant connotation. In earlier days the roads bore so little traffic that they were really open. There were no cars at a standstill wherever roads met. The meeting of hay wagons at the crossing of two farm roads was not a serious traffic condition. They were not moving fast enough. With the advent of the automobile, however, a real problem was created and the solution to this problem is a real necessity in this day of increasing traffic volume. There are many conditions under which different roads meet, each of them creating a separate problem; but essentially the conditions fall into two categories — the junction and the inter- section.
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JUNCTION
Gendreau
A junction occurs when two roads or lanes come together without crossing one another. The shape of such junctions may take the form of a T when roads join at right angles, or may form a Y if they join at an acute angle. Both types are extremely common along highways today. They offer no great problem of solution if one of the roads carries traffic in one direction only, thus avoiding left-hand turns across traf- fic. But when traffic moves in two directions on both roads, it is a very serious problem. For complete flexibility of traffic movement in such a case, left-hand turns must be permitted. Under present highway design practice this can only be accomplished satisfactorily with traffic lights.
The first problem which the average motorist runs into every day is right at his own driveway, at the junction where the driveway meets the street forcing him to make a right-angled turn. He wants to turn into the street, but he is blocked off by traffic there. He gets off to a slow start. When he gets an opening, he swings out into the flow of traffic, at once becoming an ob- struction at his slower speed, due to the small radius of the turn.
When two or more roads or streams of traffic come together and cross each other an intersection is created. Here the driver has all the difficulties of a junction — cars turning into each others' paths — plus the difficulties of cars crossing each others' paths. The simple definition of an intersection conceals the confusion that may result when at some city square or circle a half dozen traffic channels, of different sizes and densities, aim at each other from all around the compass. The intersection is the chief stumbling block for high-
FREE-FOR-ALL INTERSECTION
Underwood & Underwood
way designers and the chief headache for the traffic police. It is inherently the most heavily used point on the highway. Those standards of safety, comfort, speed and economy do not find very eloquent expression at that point. Every major intersection is a scene of contest or conflict — usually supervised by an umpire in the form of a traffic light, assisted by one or more traffic officers.
The conventional cross-shaped intersection served its purpose when conveyances were light and traffic was sparse. The old mud-and-dust buggy crossing, although a relic of the past, may until recently have met all needs. There are still back roads where that crossing is adequate if a driver can look out for the other car over a wide stretch of fields. The chance of collision in thinly populated open country is remote. Even if the automobile driver slows down, his loss of time is slight, and it is not multiplied out of all reason by the resulting delay to hundreds of cars behind him. This same driver will lose more time and run more risks at intersecting streets and well-paved highways guarded by traffic lights than he will where wagon roads cross in the fields.
Why should the crossroads most heavily traveled today be the ones that are least adapted to the safe flow of the vehicles that use them? The average car weighs about a ton and a half. At sixty miles an hour a car would strike a stationary object with as much force as if it had been dropped from a twelve-story building, and the chance that you may strike or be struck by one of them as you cross a highway checks your speed at every inter- section.
Camera Guild
BAD ROADS ARE NOT SO BAD i t ,. iiir i WHEN YOU SEE YOUR
The intersection problem is complicated by the fact that it NEIGHBOR COMING
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tangles many kinds of traffic. It tangles pedestrian traffic, livestock, slow cars, fast cars — which because of their half dozen inherent different speeds cause confusion and breakdown of the optimum speed. Over and beyond that there are the many street corners that have their own particular human factor in the shape of the traffic cop and his privileges. The cop too often exercises his own idea of traffic control rather than enforcing a predetermined plan. Street corners have their own quota of signs bearing directions, instructions and warnings. At railroad grade-crossings, sign language has been particularly prevalent. The driver approaches the danger-spot — often hidden behind a curve — keeping his eye on the road. At the same moment a suspended sign tells him to "stop, look and listen." But he can't keep his eye on the road and on the signs too. The universal American stop sign has a fatal tendency to appear so frequently that it is ignored. Surveys have shown that six drivers out of every ten drive past them without making a stop. Yet, the signs are the first
line of defense of right-angled grade crossings, camera Guild This type of intersection occurs on three- fourths of all the occasions when two Ameri- can thoroughfares meet. If you put up a traffic sign you are putting your trust in the driver's proper functioning, his willingness to cooperate, his individual sense of caution. These are risky, unstable factors to rely upon. Large signs, clanging bells, watchmen waving flags, and gates barring the way are just a few of the most common devices which have been tried at railroad crossings to abolish accidents. Intersections should be designed so that in- stead of requesting safety, they guarantee it.
SIX OUT OF TEN DON'T
Human factors at rail- road crossings, even when given these aids, are de- scribed in many national statistics. A single exam- ple may be just as dra- matic. A study made by the Erie Railroad of the total number of grade- crossing accidents along its lines in 1937 showed: Acme AND TWENTY-TWO PER CENT LOSE
in 6 per cent of the cases the cars crashed through the lowered bars and then collided with a train; in 20 per cent, the watchman's stop signs were ignored; in 22 per cent the automobiles ran into the side of the train. Nearly 70 per cent of these accidents occurred at grade crossings protected by flashers, gates or watchmen and in nearly 30 per cent of the cases, cars stalled in front of the train.
Motorists and railroad authorities are aware of the element of peril accom- panying the human factor. For years there has been agitation, in small town- ships as well as in state legislatures, to eliminate railroad grade crossings. About 2000 over- or un- derpasses are built each year. But that figure pales into insignificance when one learns that over 230,- 000 primitive grade cross- ings still remain. This is an average of about one
Harry L. Newman
FROM "LIFE" 1907
"WHEN SHALL WE THREK MEET AGAIN:
grade crossing for each mile of railroad in the country.
The practice of delaying half the traffic to give the other half a right of way goes back to the earliest days of the railroad. The first railroads improved upon the pace of horse-drawn traffic but did not improve on its intersection design. The result was train wrecks. To curb the incidence of murder at cross- ings, a Kansas legislator drafted the following bill, and helped to have it en- acted: "When two trains meet at an intersection both shall come to a full stop, and neither shall proceed until the other gets out of the way."
More than half of all intersection accidents between two automobiles occur at right-angled crossings. At in intersection, the driver usually has two choices: to lose time but play safe by stopping before the intersection, or to save time but take a chance by going ahead. A fast-moving vehicle on a straight stretch of highway driven by a good driver with a better than average reaction time requires a certain stopping distance when an obstacle appears in its path. At an intersection there is a further complication, because the driver now sees approaching at a right angle another vehicle whose speed he must esti- mate. He must be sure that his car and the other one will not meet at the intersection at the same minute and he must be sure of that fact at a distance from the intersection not only dependent on his speed but the estimated speed of the opposing car. What is even more vital is this: if he does make up his mind, and the other driver also makes up his mind, are they going to agree? It is a worse gamble than throwing dice. At least in dice one of the players is sure to win.
The last few years have seen many ingenious attempts to coax surer re- sponses out of the consciousness of the driver as he hurtles, innocently or absently, toward an intersection. In California, the approach to certain inter- sections has been made intentionally bumpy, to joggle fast drivers into slowing down before they reach the crossing. The cluster of bumps on the road before an
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intersection wakes up and warns the sleepy or absent-minded driver. Another idea is a pressed diamond pattern in the concrete at intersectional approaches. The rush of the driver's tires over the pattern gives off a loud hum, distinct from the sound of the smooth-surfaced road with a clear right of way, and thus serves as a reminder.
But the universal deterrent is still the traffic light. In its usual form it switches on and off, red to green, with no more than a theoretical regard for the volume of traffic actually moving or halting before it. It calls on the motorist for patience, submission and a waste of time, gas and nerves.
The Automatic Signal Corporation already has perfected a system which has reduced these nuisances. A unit buried in the road operates the traffic lights as a car passes over it. The device can be set so that the light can remain fixed for any interval desired. After that period, which may be long enough for several cars to pass through, it changes. A car running over the device im- mediately after this change cannot trip the signal again until a certain time has elapsed. The fixed interval is dependent on the traffic volume, the period being longer on the highway with the greatest density. Besides this system, an electro-magnetic device is in extensive use, which functions similarly, but the activating mechanism is a roller set flush in the road surface.
There have been reformers and idealists in the cause of stop-and-go lights. As early as 1916, Ernest P. Goodrich and others began to advocate the use of signals so systematized that if a motorist drove at a stipulated, uniform speed, he would find all the lights green as he approached them. Two types of this system for continuous movement of cars have been devised. In one, all lights on one street change at the same time, but these lights are grouped, say, three greens together, then three reds. The second type, a flexible progressive system, was first installed in the Chicago Loop area in 1926. Under this system, the length of time allotted to the green light is adjusted to the stipulated speed of
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cars approaching it and also to the length of the block down which they travel. It is considerably more expensive to install and maintain than the simpler system, but it comes nearer to providing what is necessary — a steady flow of traffic all along our highways.
Beyond such ingenious devices lie the solutions which do away with traffic lights entirely. When the driver approaches what he knows will be a busy intersection, it is a pleasant surprise, instead of having to jam on the brakes at the flash of a red light, to find himself routed upon a circular roadway from which four highways radiate. He wants to turn left, but he is deflected to the right around the traffic circle. Two cars are immediately ahead of him. He sees one of them turn out to complete a right-hand turn, and the other turn right at the half-way point to continue in the original direction before the circle was reached. His own car goes three-quarters of the way around before it completes the left turn. Only when he is out of the circle does he realize that two-directional traffic from four points of the compass went around that rotary simultaneously and no car stopped. All cars moved in the same direc- tion, so there could be no head-on crashes. Right-angle collisions are a possibil- ity at the junctions of the thoroughfares with the circle. However, the risk of rear-end and sideswiping complications is considerable. Progress around the rotary is slow, for all cars have to weave from lane to lane and are slowed down by the cars feeding in ahead. The rotary is not a final solution.
Traffic circles such as these have been intro- duced into rural highways quite recently, but they were employed in city street design long before there was any motor traf -
ROTARY AT CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY
E. Donald Sterner, New Jersey Highway Commissioner
fie at all. Monument Circle in Indianapolis was designed in 1821, by Ralston, an assistant of Major L'Enfant. It is now used by as many as 2000 cars an hour, and serves as the terminal for all the city bus lines. The four smaller "islands" at the entrance to each of the four avenues radiating from the circle serve pedestrians and act to turn traffic to its proper course. The comparatively large size of the central circle is highly desirable for rotary traffic, but it is also important to have wide curves where traffic turns into the circle. In this in- stance, the curb radius at these corners is only fifteen feet. As the minimum turning radius of American cars varies from seventeen to twenty-six feet, none can make this turn, no matter at what speed, without edging over into the path of cars to the left.
The rotary circle located in rural highways where traffic is intermittent allows for a constant and steady flow of traffic at all times. Although such traffic may have to slow up somewhat due to the limited radius of the circle as generally built, such traffic can at least move INDIANAPOLIS' FAMOUS MONUMENT DOESN'T through the intersection without danger of serious collision. If these radii were increased to the comparable speed of the traffic, slowing down would not be necessary. Also if route directions were supplied to the driver before he reached the traffic circle, much of the con- fusion and retardation of the traffic flow within the circle, due to the attention of the driver being diverted when looking for direc- tion signs, would be eliminated. Traffic circles handling large volumes of traffic are very in- efficient due to the weaving from lane to lane in dense traffic.
HELP TRAFFIC
NO NEED TO STOP, LOOK, LISTEN
Portland Cement Assn.
Constant and steady flow results only when conflicting currents of moving traffic are really segregated. This can be obtained by overpasses and under- passes which provide a high degree of safety. The best commentary, for ex- ample, on the elimination of railroad grade crossings is that from 1928 to 1939 — although the number of cars using the road has increased by over five million — the number of fatalities at crossings has decreased by 40 per cent. To most people overpasses and underpasses for roadways are welcome new departures. But actually they are not so new. These ideas, along with other very sophisticated methods of traffic control, were used over eighty years ago.
Most people who today use the segregated footpaths, bridle paths, prom- enades, and cross-town arteries of New York's Central Park have never heard the names Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. Least of all do they realize that the park was laid out in the pre- jigsaw days of 1858, and that Olmstead's and Vaux's designing was so sound and so prophetic that it has never had to be subjected to major changes. Pedestrian and vehicular traffic in Central Park are separated, to their mutual advantage. There are meander- ing pleasure paths, but there are also straight channels for commercial traffic to cross the park by the most direct route. Slow traffic is not endangered and fast traffic is not impeded. One is completely segregated from the other. Olm-
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stead's and Vaux's plan also provided for a uniform directional flow of traffic moving counterclockwise through the park without intersectional delay. With such a history of daring innovations, Central Park could well have be- come the public school for several generations of American highway engineers. To sum up: two ideas have taken hold in modern intersectional design. First is that of the overpass or underpass which makes it possible to drive straight through an intersection at full speed. Second is that of the traffic
Underwood & Underwood
CENTRAL PARK— 1858— USED THE UNDERPASS
circle which makes it possible to turn from one road into another without a stop. It was inevitable that these two ideas should be combined. The result is the "cloverleaf " intersection. The complete cloverleaf pattern provides sepa- rate channels for through traffic, right- and left-hand turns. Through traffic keeps straight on over or under the other road. A right turn is made on the diagonal to the right of the driver. To make a left turn, the driver continues on the through traffic lane to the far side of the underpass, turns right, and
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E. Donald Sterner, New Jersey Highway Commissioner
THE CLOVERLEAF— TRANSITIONAL IMPROVEMENT— BUT NOT THE ANSWER
makes a complete circle along the border of one of the four leaves which are ramped, connecting lower and upper road levels.
In comparison with an ordinary intersection, it is manifestly a very superior but expensive structure. When built at the crossing of two heavily traveled highways it may result in a saving of countless vehicle hours a year, as well as innumerable lives. But it is not the final solution. Although there is no light to stop the traffic, the left turn has to be constructed with such a sharp curve that cars must reduce speed to between eight and ten miles an hour to turn left safely. For an individual driver, this loss of speed may represent nothing more than an annoyance. But if traffic in the right-hand lane is heavy, the reduced speed of the car making a left-hand turn is reflected back to the rest of the cars behind, and the old familiar wasteful traffic jam appears again.
If an intersection was crucial to a motorist yesterday, it was not because his car was fast, but because it was not dependable. His brakes were not good ; they might make him coast across the road when traffic was against him. His
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engine might stall as he crossed. The problem today is not the physical fact of difficulty in crossing streams of traffic, but those continual slight pauses of a minute or so — the equivalent of miles of travel. The solution is a continuous flow of traffic with speed and safety.
In place of the present system of prohibitive and directive control, there should be a system that functions automatically. Such a system includes both the highway and the driver. The highway, ideally designed, must be self- functioning; and the driver must function easily as part of it.
Look ahead twenty years to a picture of the crossing point of two major two-directional highway routes. Here seven lanes of traffic move in four di- rections safely, easily, and with no diminution of speed.
The straight-ahead, free movement of through traffic on all lanes is accom- plished by use of the underpass. Both right and left turns are made at fifty- mile speed only, on additional lanes entirely separate from those carrying the through traffic. The motorways incorporate automatically controlled speed reduction points enabling cars to reduce to fifty miles an hour before reaching the intersection approaches. A driver desiring to turn right onto the crossing motorway must be in the right lane of the fif ty-mile-an-hour group. The auto-
TRAFFIC FLOW ON PRESENT DAY CLOVERLEAF
Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
THE CROSSING POINT OF TWO FUTURE MOTORWAYS
matic motorway control provides for his crossing safely into this lane. At a point approximately two and a half miles from the intersection his car is eased to the right out of the through- traffic flow and he travels along a paralleling lane which becomes a ramped curve to the right. The grade is easy, the gener- ous curve scarcely perceptible. As this curving lane nears the crossing motor- way it straightens out, and the car traveling over it gradually flows into the outside fifty-mile through- traffic lane. If a driver on the motorway wants to make a left turn at one of these intersections, he must do so from the left fifty- mile lane. From this lane he diverges to the left into a separate parallel lane, speeds along on a gently ramping curve sweeping to the left, parallels the cross- ing motorway and gradually merges into a space in the flow of cars moving
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in the innermost fifty-mile lane. Speed and spacing on this intersection are controlled automatically and there is no interference with the motorway traffic. The turning-off lanes are elevated or depressed so that there is no inter- ference. This new type of intersection occupies no greater area than the clover- leaf of 1940, when the proportion of the motorway and its capacity of traffic in comparison with present-day roads are taken into consideration.
Although the cost of constructing such an intersection would be consider- ably more than that of constructing today's cloverleaf, that too costs more than the intersection of former times; and where traffic is heavy there is an in- crease in safety, speed, comfort, and economy that is as great as that provided by the cloverleaf over previous intersections. The economy in this case is not derived from a reduction in original construction costs, but from a very real, cumulative dollars-and-cents saving to the motorists who use it.
In discussing the problems of traffic on the highways, in the preceding chapter, it was pointed out that physical means built into the highway are possible solutions for overcoming the dangers of traffic and the retardation of
Norman Bel Geddes, 1935 TRAFFIC FLOW ON MOTORWAY INTERSECTION
1000 FOOT RADIUS
traffic flow; but that the adaptation of advanced scientific principles to pro- vide a guide operating completely automatically in conjunction with the highway and the car offered the only solution to the traffic problem on a straight stretch of highway. Similar dangerous and inefficient traffic condi- tions exist in regard to the highway intersection. To alleviate these conditions it is possible to build an advanced type of highway intersection such as that just described.
Suppose for a minute that all cars on a highway operated on a cog track, within the road surface; that they were spaced equal distances apart on all highways, and that they were driven on this cog track at equal speeds. With such a physically controlled system it would be possible at an intersection to control the cars on one highway to make them pass through the spaces between cars on the crossing highway and vice versa, with complete safety and at any speed. This same control can be obtained by adapting the electro-magnetic control utilized for regulating the car speed and spacing along uninterrupted stretches of highway. The application of such automatic control to the inter- section would provide for continuous infiltration of the two crossing streams of traffic, both streams of traffic operating continuously at constant speed, without interruption, and without physical separation.
Infiltration is a military term used to denote a method of attack by which the attacking troops sift through the enemy line and are re-formed when the objective is reached. This word "infiltration" aptly describes the operation of an automatic control of intersecting traffic. The method of providing a con- tinuous and uninterrupted flow of through traffic at any intersection is based on the automatic regulation of uniform spacing of cars in their respective lanes and the maintenance of a constant speed in all lanes. Added to this funda- mental requirement is the need for control between cars in different lanes and the correlation of the control mechanism of the intersecting highways.
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One factor important to this concept and important to all traffic flow is that maneuvering and turning lanes are outside and apart from through lanes. As rural highways approach an intersection they should be widened by one lane on each side to provide for this. In the case of urban streets where such widening is impossible, it is necessary to keep the outside or curb lane free of parked cars and through traffic in order that this lane be always available for maneuvering. Also important is the radius of curves used on intersecting highways. They should be of sufficient magnitude to permit cars turning from one route into the other without reducing speed. Present-day city streets with their small curb radii will not allow this, so that turns must be made at re- duced speeds.
With these physical requirements and means of automatic control, any type of intersection or junction at grade can be made safe and efficient. Cars traveling directly through an intersection remain on the straight through lanes of the highway and maintain their speed and direction without change and without interruption. They weave through spaces provided between the cars in the crossing traffic. This process of infiltration or cross-weaving goes on continuously. Uniform car-to-car spacing and speed are maintained in both directions at all times. The parallel maneuvering lanes lead directly into the curves necessary for making a right-hand turn. Here, too, there is no interruption and a car, after taking the curve, automatically flows into the line of through traffic in the new direction which it desires to take. This maneuver is no different from that which would take place on the physically separated type of intersection previously described.
Cars proposing to make a left-hand turn will also draw over into the right- hand maneuvering lane but instead of following the sweeping curve to the right will continue straight ahead. At a designated point in this lane, the car will automatically start a left turn. In making this turn, it will cross the
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AUTOMATICALLY CONTROLLED SPEED AND SPACING WILL PERMIT MAXIMUM NUMBER OF CARS
through lanes of traffic to reach the maneuvering lane parallel to the lanes of traffic which travel in the new direction which the car is to take. From the maneuvering lane the car will flow into the regular traffic stream. Again, this infiltration process is made possible by the correlation of the control method provided in each lane of traffic.
It becomes necessary to provide accurate predetermined spacing of cars, and to maintain uniform speed in each lane as well as in each of the intersect- ing highways, and a definite and fixed relation between these factors in each of the lanes of traffic. When that is done, this type of intersection can be applied, regardless of the number of lanes operating in the highway, and regardless of the speed of travel in these lanes.
A free-flowing traffic system necessarily must consider the small with the great; it must solve all the problems that are an everyday occurrence to every driver of a car. The retardation to the smooth flow of traffic on the highways and streets of this country starts way back at the smallest intersection and progressively gets worse as the volume of traffic increases.
In spite of the fact that the problems at the large intersection are more obvious than they are at the small crossroad, the curative measures needed in both situations are similar. They may differ in detail and degree, but they
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Norman Bel Geddes. 1938
TO PASS THROUGH SPACING BETWEEN THEM
should be examined from the same viewpoint. In all intersections, the follow- ing standards should be maintained: i) the radii of the curves should be adapted to the prescribed speed on the intersecting roads so that speed can be maintained without interruption; 2) the view from every direction should extend far enough so that all approaching cars will be plainly visible; 3) curves should be banked to facilitate comfortable maintenance of speed; 4) wherever practicable, a car control system should operate which will provide for the infiltration of traffic without interruption.
Every intersection in the country today is obsolete because the fundamental precepts of traffic flow — safety, comfort, speed and economy — are not con- sidered as a unit but are chosen as separate items on which to base new develop- ments. One intersection considers safety only as its foundation, neglecting the other vital considerations; another is constructed under the rules of com- fort. Rarely are both safety and economy of time built into the same traffic crossing. And as long as these fundamentals are allowed to be broken up, just so long will intersections remain obsolete.
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FULL SPEED THROUGH BOTTLENECKS
is a bottleneck? It isn't just congestion. Congestion is a general term- some thing that applies to the forty-eight states, with special application to Greater New York, greater Los Angeles, Detroit and a good many other greater and lesser places. A bottleneck is something specific — a narrowing space caus- ing convergence, like a funnel. A bottleneck is a special phase of the problem of converging traffic. It is the place where a greater number of traffic lanes funnel up to a given point than there are lanes available to take the resulting volume beyond the point. No highway en- gineer would consciously design a bottleneck. Yet there are so many varieties of the species that they bear classification.
THIS WAS DONE PURPOSELY Camera Guild
THIS ISN'T INTENTIONAL
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Portland Cement Assn.
COUNTY LINE EFFICIENCY
One of the most frequent might be called the "county-line bottleneck." This occurs when a fine glittering four-lane highway suddenly stops, like the end of an expression of local pride, at an invisible boundary. The implication seems to be that there is no point in driving farther. It happens because some- one has planned a four-lane road in one county, and the next county joins it with just a two-lane road. It is due to lack of coordinated planning. Beyond the line the road may become a two-lane macadam job, of pre-Prohibition vintage.
Type two is the "detour bottleneck." That occurs when road repair work — widening or reconstruction — blocks either part or all of the roadway. In the first instance, two lanes of traffic have to fight their way through one. In the second, traffic is turned off into the busy wilderness known as a detour. The detour road, it seems, is never as good as the regular road. Even if the detour has adequate width, cars are inevitably slowed down due to one reason or another, which soon affects those far back along the regular road. It is only temporary, but it is a bottleneck just the same.
Type three might be termed the "big building bottleneck." A department store in a crowded section of town prospers. After it has added escalators and sub-basements, it takes on extra stories and a series of annexes. On the morn- ings of special sales, there is a pedestrian queue outside the building all around the block. Twice as many customers are entering the store as did five years ago. In that period the number of trucks backing up to the receiving entrances
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has doubled. Likewise the number of delivery trucks. But during all this growth, no change has been made in the street pattern around the store. The streets re- tain the same form and capacity as they did five years ago when the store did half as much business.
Type four, by now renowned in song and story, is the "stadium bottleneck." It occurs in short but fre- quent and very dramatic periods on Saturday after- noons, holidays, and special occasions around such places of pilgrimage as the Yale Bowl, Soldier Field, or the Olympic Stadium in Los Angeles. At three o'clock a hundred thousand people are herding toward a flag-topped amphitheater. At five o'clock they are herding out of it. The stadium has been designed for just such mass movement. It is usually emptied, with- out fuss or casualty, within fifteen minutes after the final whistle. But the roads around it were not de- signed for such movement. Los Angeles may say that since the University doesn't pay taxes on its land there is no reason why citizens should spend millions to make the football fans comfortable. In the meantime, the answer to a hundred thousand people is — a hundred traffic cops. This type of bottleneck could have been prevented by good planning when the approaches were built. The traffic problem around the stadium is as much a pedestrian one as a motor car problem. A bot- tleneck does not merely apply to motor cars. A street in a large city, that passes a public school from which
Above: THE CITY STREET BOTTLENECK
Below: PEDESTRIAN PROBLEM SOLVED. TRAFFIC PROBLEM UNSOLVED
thousands of children surge forth twice daily, is a very dangerous bottleneck.
Everyone has his own favorite roadway funnel. Like the fisherman boast- ing of his catch, he may be inclined to gloat sardonically over the length of the stream of cars trying to get through that particular edge of hell. The high- pressure commuters of Westchester County, New York, have a regional record in the bottleneck at Fleetwood, where the four-lane artery connecting two great new parkways suddenly humps, drops down a steep grade, and corkscrews into a two-lane bridge spanning the New York Central tracks. What makes this contender for the questionable record dramatic is that traffic approaching it comes upon it unexpectedly, after having become accustomed to miles of easy high-speed highway travel. The traffic which had gradually loosened up and spread out is suddenly telescoped, jamming and sputtering on the steep grades to the bridgehead almost in the character of a camel trying to push through the eye of a needle.
There is no use going on classifying. The engineering features of the Hol- land Tunnel are excellent, as has been previously pointed out; its service dur- ing moderate traffic conditions is adequate; but due to its multiple approaches it also is a perfect bottleneck. The cause here was high engineering costs. Removal of natural barriers involved such immense expenditure that it was
decided to keep the tun-
TWENTY-SEVEN LANES TRYING TO GET INTO TWO LANES Port of New York Authority nej cJQWn tQ a tWQ Jane
system. But the lanes that approach it do not add up to two. They are so many in number and capacity that at peak hours they develop a volume of traf- fic that cannot be com-
pressed into the tunnel without considerable delay and confusion.
One of the most common forms of bottleneck occurs at bridgeheads and is essentially the same as that created at the tunnel entrance. At the fag end of holidays or week-ends, almost everyone has been exposed time after time, summer after summer, to that most dismal of all motoring experiences: driv- ing back to the city across a bridge. It need not be a drawbridge, where delay can be understood. It may be a big suspension bridge which is inadequate to handle its traffic. While you are still miles away, the car ahead of you and the cars ahead of that, on and on to the unseen bridge, slow down. You drive as close together as freight cars, though not as fast as the slowest freight. It is not driving. Hopelessly often, it is a dead halt. There is no splendor in the sunset. All the fun is drained out of the holiday. You are numbed to any emotion except exasperation.
No one on the road seems to be getting anywhere. Fenders scrape, collars wilt and reaching the bridge becomes not a matter of minutes but of hours. There is no compensating pleasure once you come upon it, long after night- fall. Like every car ahead, you await your turn for this precious road space arched across the water. Other lines of traffic feed slowly in before you have a chance at it. Then, you are on the bridge. Harried drivers are still picking their opportunity to slip into a faster moving lane, despite warning signs to the contrary. Outgoing traffic is cut to a minimum, but still cars from the overcrowded incoming lanes encroach upon it.
Just as the pace of highway development has not kept up with the pace of automobile development, so it is true that bridge development has not kept up with highway development. Most of America's tens of thousands of bridges were built in the era of slower traffic moving on a two-lane road. When the time came, the road was widened. Traffic sped up. But it wasn't such an easy matter to widen a bridge. Perhaps the bridge should have been replaced en-
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tirely. Maybe the Highway Commission couldn't afford such an item that year. The road was built, but the bridge was postponed. The result is that the high-speed traffic which has been flowing for miles along the highway sud- denly has to slow down at the bridgehead with the inevitable jam of cars approaching the bridge.
The State of Indiana, for example, has not ignored the work of highway improvement. In the past few years it has widened 1800 miles of state high- way— the major roads to 100 feet and the secondary roads to 80 feet. But the Chairman of its State Highway Commission complains that nearly 2000 bridges and culverts along the system are so narrow that they alone cause great delay and many deaths each year. To replace them by adequate structures, he says, would cost- about 25 billion dollars.
Just how the lag operates is shown by the story of the Queensboro Bridge, opened in 1909 to carry a fast-growing volume of traffic between midtown Manhattan and developments on Long Island. At first it had three lanes ; then two more were added. In 1931 an upper deck was opened, giving the bridge a total of seven lanes. This sounded like continual improvement. But at the same time there were repeated efforts to open up and spread out the bridge's approach plazas. While city officials were struggling with approach property and while the bridge was taking on a lane here and there, the lanes feeding the bridge were increasing at a much greater rate. Today there are, estimated con- servatively, six streets or twenty- four lanes on each side of the river. Easily more than fifty lanes of traffic feed into this bridge from both ends. The bridge has only seven lanes to cope with the situation. This is the situation to- day, and settlements are still rising by the hundreds on Long Island. The approach land, not bought in time, is now prohibitive in cost. The Queensboro Bridge will never be able to cope with this problem.
Famous spans like this or the Eads Bridge at St. Louis were built to meet
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the conditions and requirements that prevailed at the time they were designed. Their designs did not anticipate the automotive era. Conditions have changed entirely. The old roadways which were built to meet those conditions have perhaps been replaced, but the bridges linger on because financially they obsolesce far more slowly than any other highway structure. It takes sixty to eighty years to amortize a bridge. The obvious conclusion is that bridges de- signed today should not be planned just for today's needs. They should take into consideration all the possible needs that may arise during their lifetime
Underwood & Underwood
QUEENSBORO BRIDGE, NEW YORK
— a life that is likely to exceed the classically allotted three-score and ten.
The Bay Bridge at San Francisco consists of two decks, with six lanes for high-speed automobile traffic on the top deck, and three lanes for bus and truck traffic on the lower deck, which is also designed to carry an electric railway line. But perhaps the key fact about the bridge is not the bridge itself but what happens before one gets to it. There are four and a half miles of approaches. They include ramps leading on and off, overpasses and underpasses to avoid intersecting traffic, and on the Oakland side a distribution system which goes beyond the modern cloverleaf pattern. The intention of the design-
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»• * •
BAY BRIDGE, SAN FRANCISCO
International News
ers was to get an immense volume of traffic across the bridge quickly, without slowing down. In the first full year of operation, 9,109,349 vehicles made the crossing. Planning had worked.
The Bay Bridge is not especially broad, as great spans go. There is a lesson in that. When one sees a congested bridge, one is likely to think the trouble is that it is too narrow; the real trouble is that it does not have enough lanes. The earliest covered bridges suggested the possibility of increasing the height of a bridge rather than its width. A two-decker bridge is a rarity in our midst. But there is no reason why we should be limited even to two decks.
Bottlenecks within our highway system can only be eliminated or avoided by a comprehensive and long-range planning program. County-line bottle- necks would not occur if there were cooperative highway planning between adjoining counties. Detour bottlenecks would not exist if highway construc- tion undertakings were adequately planned before construction started, so as to provide adequate detour routes for the existing traffic on the highway under construction or under repair. Big building bottlenecks would not exist if there were adequate town and city planning programs, incorporating and making allowance for growth of the city and town, as well as increased traffic resulting from such growth. Stadium bottlenecks exist only because highway approaches were not planned in conjunction with the planning of the stadium, or the selection of the location for the stadium was not made with regard to the traffic facilities available.
Bridges and tunnels across natural barriers to highway traffic are the most common type of bottleneck, and therefore the most flagrant example of lack of planning. Bridges built before the full magnitude of automobile traffic was foreseen become bottlenecks on the highway leading to the bridge when this highway is widened to carry a greater volume of traffic without, at the same time, widening or increasing the capacity of the bridge. Bridges and tunnels
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APPROACH TO NEW YORK'S .GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE
built since the automobile era have also, in many instances, been constructed without development of their approaches and the highways leading to them. Bridges for automobile traffic should be built to provide for expansion of the bridge itself — that is, to provide for the construction of a greater number of lanes as traffic density increases. At the same time they should provide, in
their plaza approaches and on the highways lead- ing to them, facilities for handling expansion of the approaching highways and the bridge-approach plaza.
Here is a glimpse into the future twenty years from now, at a suspension bridge that carries a mo- torway across a wide river. The approach plaza where bridge traffic is collected and distributed reaches far from the bridge. There is no bridgehead conges- tion. The motorway is two-directional as it en- ters the approach plaza. Its design shows four fifty-mile lanes with sepa- rators; a grass strip; two
Fairchild
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15 LANES CONVERGE TO 3 LANES
^Hi^ ^mfiiL
2 LANES *% I
seventy-five-mile lanes with separators; a grass strip; and a hundred-mile lane. On this motorway, cars are traveling toward the bridge.
On a similar seven-lane road, and separated from this one by a grass strip, are cars traveling in the opposite direction. As this double motorway ap- proaches a town feeder boulevard running at right angles to it, the hundred- and seventy-five-mile lanes start on a rising grade with the roadway carried on columns. The fifty-mile lanes are gradu- ally drawn in to take a position under the high- speed lanes forming a two-tier viaduct that overpasses the feeder boulevard. The town feeder has eight lanes of fifty-mile traffic moving in opposite directions. As the traffic nears the mo- torway, the two outside lanes make a right turn on a radius that will allow
a fifty-mile undiminished 3 LANES
speed, ramp up and enter below the two-tier struc- ture to form a third tier.
At the same point a re- GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE APPROACH PROBLEM
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3 LANES
4 LANES
Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison '
verse procedure occurs and cars come from the bridge on two lanes turning left and ramping down to form a two-lane strip along the town feeder. On the opposite side of the motorway, similar provisions are made for traffic approaching from that direction.
The approach structure takes shape as a three-tier viaduct; eight fifty-mile lanes on the lower level, eight fifty-mile lanes on the middle level, and four seventy-five-mile and two hundred-mile lanes on the top level. It continues ramping up; now it crosses a second town feeder boulevard. More cars are gathered in by the same sys- tem as before. Still the struc- ture rises: now it consists of four tiers. All the time each lane preserves its own integrity. No one cuts in. No one fears
collision. No one slows down. Traffic moves without delay.
This bridge with its huge stainless steel towers is designed to allow for
expansion. The towers are not double piers. They are single masts. Four tiers
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FUTURE BRIDGE PLAZA WILL ELIMINATE BOTTLENECK APPROACHES
Norman Bel Geddes, 1935
of highway run one above the other, keeping the bridge rela- tively narrow. The need for cross-bracing is reduced. Half of the traffic lanes hang out- side the great spires on canti- levered supports. Only those lanes necessary immediately need be built at first, then as more are required they are added. The original structure is designed to accommodate it- self to such expansion. The lanes head across the span. It is not obvious to the driver when he leaves it, for the distributing plaza at the other end merely continues the shape and speed of the lanes. The bridge is not a special structure that inter- rupts the motorway. It has not been tinkered with or lamely widened to meet the toll of traffic. It has been built along the lines of one unified and elo- quent principle: to provide full road width and full road speed at every point along the highway.
No bottleneck is ever created intentionally. In fact, the cause for the bottle-
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GROUND LEVEL
SECOND LEVEL
THIRD LEVEL TOP LEVEL
L •• :-•••
TRAFFIC FLOW ON APPROACHES TO FUTURE MULTI-DECK BRIDGE
BRIDGES WILL CARRY SAME NUMBER OF LANES AS APPROACHES
Futurama Photo by General Motors
neck is probably the only cause in the world which can find no defenders. Therefore, it is not enough simply to point out that bottlenecks should not exist; it is not enough to point an accusing finger at a flagrant example and say that it is a flagrant example. Once a road is built, the points along it where congestion occur are only too obvious. The trick is to ascertain these points in advance, to prevent them. Therefore, any road, before it is built, should be
1000 FOOT RADIUS
100 MILE (TWO LANES) 75 MILE (FOUR LANES)
50 MILE (FOUR LANES) FUTURE EXPANSION (FOUR LANES)
50 MILE (EIGHT LANES)
50 MILE (EIGHT LANES)
Norman Bel Geddes, 1935
DISTRIBUTION OF TRAFFIC LANES ON MULTI-DECK BRIDGE
analyzed in regard to all its possible future uses. The highway designer must determine what kinds of traffic will be using the road, at what point on the road the greatest number of cars will get on it, and where most of the cars will want to get off. It is possible to determine this by thorough traffic surveys and by population analysis. Elimination of bottlenecks can be achieved through intelligent, far-sighted planning in advance of road construction.
DAYLIGHT STANDARDS FOR NIGHT DRIVING
w,
HEN a man ventured forth at night through the streets of eighteenth century London or New York, he carried a lantern to light the way between puddles and pitfalls. If he was a member of the "gentry" he hired a boy to carry the lantern for him. When, in the following century, a coal miner reached the bottom of the shaft and began his way through dark wet tunnels, he lit the light fixed to his helmet. Both Victorian miner and Georgian city- reveller found the lantern perfectly suited to their purpose; as they groped and twisted, the light twisted with them.
In 1940 people are still groping around with lanterns. The only difference is that now they are hung on the front of a car or truck, and the rate of grop- ing through the darkness is between thirty and sixty miles an hour. Of course, this lantern is a good deal brighter than its ancestors — so bright, in fact, that it succeeds in blinding anyone driving toward it. It blinds him so effectively that after its flash has passed, it takes his eye almost a minute to readjust itself to darkness, during which time, still half-blind, he may be traveling as much as half a mile. It is a most diabolically effective instrument.
[125]
A CAT BEGINS TO LIVE AT NIGHT
To a greater or lesser degree everyone is blind at night. Too much light is as bad as too little. Headlights are not bright enough to light the road ahead but too bright for the approaching driver. The shift from darkness to brilliance and back again is too swift. Twenty years ago, visibility distance with au- tomobile headlights on light-colored dry roads was from 200 to 250 feet. On dark or wet roads, the visibility was virtually nil. Today, while great advances have been made in the construction of cars, and great increases in their speed, the visibility of headlights has not greatly changed. Driving at a speed of more than 40 miles an hour on an unlighted high- way, even though the road be dry, the night clear and the high-beam headlights burning brightly, the driver might just as well be blindfolded so far as his visibility is related to the speed of his car. Add to this the fact that when the car is rounding a curve, its headlights point diagonally off, missing the roadside entirely and sometimes reducing the visi- bility to 5 0 feet, increasing the driver's blindness still more.
If automobile headlights comply with all legal requirements, they will en- able a driver to pick out a dark object on an unlighted road only about 150 feet ahead of him. The Police Department of Pasadena, California, became very much interested in this fact. Their research taught them that a car driv- ing at 60 miles an hour could under no circumstances be stopped in less than 200 feet. This established the possibility that if a pedestrian was crossing the path of a car moving at 60 miles an hour and if he was 150 feet ahead of it, he
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Underwood & Underwood
would be dragged 5 0 feet before the car came -j
"o
•
to a stop. This would happen even if the^
• driver applied his brakes the instant he sawj
him, and even if his brakes were working per- fectly.
In general, public authorities studying the problem of night accidents have paid rela- tively scant attention to the darkness factor. They have accepted the increase in traffic fatalities as being the result of more cars and greater speed. This seems a logical assumption until one breaks down the totals of fatalities into daylight accidents and night accidents. Then one finds an astonishing fact. In 1937 automobile accidents caused more deaths than fires, typhoid, diphtheria, railroads, airplanes, BUT 21,900 AUTOISTS DIED AT NIGHT IN A YEAR
and ships all put together. They numbered 39,700. Of this total, 23,800 peo- ple were killed at night. This would be understandable if by far the greater volume of traffic moved at night. But as everyone knows, it doesn't. Only about one-third of all motor traffic moves at night. And yet two-thirds of all fatal motor accidents occur at night.
Accident figures emphasize that not only are there more accidents by night than by day, but that the severity of night-time accidents is far greater than that of daytime accidents. One in every forty-nine daytime motor vehicle injuries proves fatal. But at night there is one death for every twenty-six injuries. Furthermore, this discrepancy gets greater every year. In the period from 1930 to 1937 inclusive, there was a 2 per cent decline in daytime accident deaths, while there was an increase of almost 30 per cent in night-
[127]
m~ itp '
Gendreau
THE LIGHT THAT FAILED
time fatalities. These figures point to an obvious conclusion. Whereas efforts have been made and are being made to improve conditions of daytime driving, little has been done to overcome the greater hazards of the road at night.
It is significant, too, that the greatest number of fatalities occurs between the hours of 5 P.M. and 8 P.M. During these hours in winter, when the night falls quickly, more than twice as many deaths occur as in summer when the light lingers. This is in spite of the fact that the traffic volume during this hour in summer is apt to be greater than it is during the same hour in winter. Darkness itself, then, must be the hazard-creating element. It is true that at night there are a greater number of fatigued, intoxicated or irresponsible drivers. It is also true that there is a heavier component of large commercial vehicles in the traffic stream. But the main fact is that night creates an en- tirely different kind of traffic. A new relationship is established between driver and highway. When the sun goes down there is no change in the car or the road, or, necessarily, the driver or the weather. But there is the change from light to darkness, all-important because it makes the driver orient himself to an entirely new set of conditions.
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For instance, it has been established that for a driver traveling at 50 miles an hour, safety requires that he have unobstructed vision for at least 575 feet ahead. Yet when that driver is placed upon that road at night, without lights along the way and only his own headlights to go by, his maximum visibility is about 200 feet, and a set of headlights coming down the highway from the opposite direction — even if they are very low in intensity — reduces the driv- er's perception, already dangerously limited, by 60 per cent.
Obviously what is lacking is proper lighting. The remedy usually offered is to illuminate the highways themselves, so that drivers will not have to de- pend on automobile headlights. But even highway lighting is not necessarily proper lighting. If it is incorrect in design or inadequate in strength — and this is the case on most highways which have been lighted so far — it creates still another danger factor.
A lighted street is safer than an unlighted one. But during what period should a highway be lit? In the British Empire there is a law that specifies a moment called "lighting-up time" which varies from day to day in accord- ance with the sun's disappearance. A small English town, apparently eager to augment this ruling, hung upon its lampposts a curfew regulation which ended with the following ironic definition of darkness: "It is dark when the street lights are on."
Except near the equator where night conies suddenly, there is a considerable interval between sundown and night. Darkness comes gradually. One's eyes become adjusted to the increasing dimness of vision. Only after the street lights are on does one look up with a dazzled start and realize that darkness is coming in earnest. This dazzlement does not come from any notable con- trast between twilight and the daylight that preceded it. The realization that it is dark comes from the contrast between the bright spot of the lamplight itself and the comparative darkness around it.
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The type of lamp and standard used on those highways which are actually lighted today has been copied from the types traditionally used on city streets. But just as the light on the "great white ways" of American cities is no longer white, but a confusion of flickering commercial signs of every known hue, so the hopeful attempt to illuminate highways with lofty standards has be- come rather tangled up in the maze of roadside floodlights, neon lights, lunch- wagon lights, traffic lights, and flashing headlights. How haphazard the think- ing behind conventional highway illumination is, is suggested by the way many highway lighting systems are administered. Until midnight or i A.M. there is fairly adequate illumination. Then, suddenly, the whole system is switched off. Traffic has not stopped. No curfew has rung. There are plenty of people who have to go on driving for the rest of the night — the doctor on an emergency call, the through tourist, the long-distance truckman, the late home-comer — but they get no help. The reason given for the shutdown is, of
course, economy. But that doesn't make it any easier or safer for the man who happens to be on the road at 1:05 A.M rather than 12:55 A.M.
A great deal of experimenting is being done on new types of lamps for highway lighting. Most important of these are the sodium vapor lamps and the mercury vapor lamps. And al- though these lamps have not yet reached per- fection, they are from an engineering stand- point a step in the right direction and have much to recommend them. They are both more penetrating and more economical than regular lights. One of their drawbacks, how-
ROAD SIGNS FOR CATS
General Electric
SODIUM SAFETY LIGHTS
ever, is that the eerie pallor which they give to the highway scene is decidedly unpleasant to the motorist. Rapid progress is also being made in improving the efficiency of the incandescent filament type of lamp. New incandescent lamps of high intensity, supplemented by improved reflectors lining the luminaire, are already in use, a notable example of which is found on New Jersey's White Horse Pike. Sodium vapor and mercury vapor have also been combined with incandescent lamps to form a new fluorescent type of light. As compared with regular incandescent lamps, the sodium vapor lamps give nearly three times as much light for the amount of electricity used. In New Jersey, accidents have been cut in half where sodium light has been employed. This type of lighting was first used in 1933, and is especially effective for wide streets because it distributes its light broadly.
In addition to direct lighting methods, there are in use today several types of indirect lighting systems, consisting of large reflector buttons which do not have a light source of their own but which reflect back upon the high- way the light from approaching headlamps. They outline the road for a mile ahead except at curves or where they are obstructed. Their great virtue
General Electric
CURVES LIT BY INCANDESCENT LUMINAIRES
lies in the fact that they define a roadway at no cost whatever other than that of installation. They are not intended to replace highway lights, but simply to supplement them. The most recently developed reflector buttons are ap- proximately eight times more powerful than any previously used.
Not only are experiments being made with different types of lighting, but also with the manner of their installation. The lighting system installed on the upper deck of a double-decked viaduct in Cincinnati consists of lighting units placed in the balustrade of the viaduct which throw their light horizontally across the road surface from both sides, rather than down on the surface from high above.
Lack of uniformity among state laws on intensity of headlights, their loca- tion and their general characteristics makes progress in the correction of the problem difficult. Obviously there can be no great advancement in practical lighting until the authorities get together and agree. It may be found necessary to set up a central body, such as the Bureau of Standards, to arrive at a unified control of this universal problem. Under today's system of local responsibility for lighting, there is apt to be needless duplication of research and study by people inadequately equipped for such a large task. A centralizing agency could collect and coordinate the scattered research on the subject, test new methods, and recommend modern types of lighting after sufficiently broad experimentation had proved their merit.
Scientific experimentation has recently resulted in the perfection of a new material for use in automobile headlight lenses and in automobile windshields which promises great improvement in efficient highway illumination by head- lights without corresponding headlight glare. This material, called Polaroid, was developed by Edwin H. Land, in 1934. It is a flexible, transparent film that in appearance somewhat resembles cellophane. This material acts to comb out or regiment the light which passes through it, so that the light which has
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*»."%»
Portland Cement Association
SAFETY RIBS BY DAY AND REFLECTED ILLUMINATION BY NIGHT
•
FINDING A THREE-LEAF CLOVER BY NIGHT
Underwood & Underwoc
been transmitted through it vibrates in only one plane, whereas normally light vibrates in all planes. This type of light is called polarized light, and has been known to science for over 200 years. However, this property of light could not be made use of commercially until the introduction of Polaroid, because of the excessive cost of materials existing for the purpose of polarizing light. The great advantage of Polaroid is in the fact that it can be produced prac- tically and economically on a commercial scale.
In a beam of light such as that from a normal automobile headlight waves are vibrating in every plane along the beam. However, replace the headlight lens with a sheet of polarized material, and its crystals will comb out all of the vibrations except those vibrating in a particular plane. The beam of light which has passed through the polarized material will then have light vibra- tions in only one plane. Then take a second sheet of the polarized material and place it in the path of light that has passed through the first. If its crystals are parallel to those of the first sheet, the light will get through. If they are at right angles, the light will be stopped.
This characteristic of polarized light is made use of in the automobile in the following way: a piece of polarized material is sandwiched between layers of glass from the headlight lens of the automobile. This is so placed that the light passing through it is vibrating in a plane at 45 degrees to the road. Then a similar piece is made a part of the windshield of the car, and oriented in such a way that when two cars approach each other along a highway the plane of the polarized light from the headlights of one car is at right angles to the polarized plane provided by the windshield of the opposing car. Therefore the rays of light from the opposing car cannot pass through the windshield of the approaching car, and the headlights, instead of glaring at the driver, ap- pear as a very faint glow indicating merely the position of the oncoming automobile. At the same time, all of the light from both cars which is still on
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the road surface clearly illuminates the surface and makes it visible as if no other car were approaching. The headlights themselves appear only as faint disks, dim but clearly discernible. With this abolition of glare comes freedom from the usual partial blindness that occurs while two cars are passing.
Of course there is no point in installing polarized material in one car unless it is installed in other cars as well. The effectiveness of this material depends entirely on the passage of a national law. It cannot be applied locally.
A special aspect of the science of lighting is the study of color. First there is the color of the road surface. Everyone who drives at night has experienced the sense of relief that occurs on changing from a black macadam road surface to light gray concrete. The difference is that the concrete has far higher light- reflecting power. Its light background causes objects to stand out in bold relief for a longer distance ahead. Then there is the color of the illumination. Experimental tests are now being conducted with lights that have a green tint. White light, because of its tendency to produce glare, is by no means ideal for the human eye.
These studies and experiments for improved highway lighting, improved headlight illumination and improved road and light colors all tend to relieve the highway illumination problem. But the basic problem is much greater than any of these aspects of it would indicate. The solution can only be obtained by a broad outlook at the whole problem of highway lighting.
On most present-day highways there is either a total absence of light or the kind of lighting that belongs to pre-motor days. The tall handsome lamp- posts that are still set up along the highways seem like sentimental relics of those days. They look a good deal like old-fashioned domestic bridge lamps. It is not necessary that a bridge lamp light up a whole room. It must simply give strong illumination over the book or game on which eyes are focused. The current highway bridge lamp does the same thing. It gives brilliant patches
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General Electric
SODIUM LAMPS REDUCING ALTERNATE SHADED AREAS
of light which alternate with dark areas. Its patches, true enough, are very brilliant. They have to be. If you hang your light way up, you have to make it intense. But the consequence is simple and eloquent: it is glare again.
It is a commonplace, but it bears repeating: everyone is agreed that the best lighting is daylight. That has a corollary. In daylight the vertical objects on the road are dark compared with the light surface of the road. Thus, in order to get the best conditions on the road at night as well, the objects should be left dark, and the horizontal surface lit up.
The problem of keeping a highway continuously illuminated after night- fall is one of cost. But the cost of lighting highways is a comparatively small fraction of their expense. And the results of lighting are greater use of exist- ing roadways, increased speed of night driving and substantial savings in life and property.
In the next twenty years, immense progress is going to be made to eliminate the old hazard of night driving. Cars will still have headlights, of course, to be used on minor roads, but these will probably utilize the advantages of polarized light. Motorways will be lit. But their illumination will be entirely
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re-studied, not only regarding the equipment itself, but regarding the location of the equipment. Lights will be brought down out of their bridge-lamp eleva- tion and placed closer to the highway surface where their lights may be more effectively used, illuminating the road itself rather than the upper ether. Lights will be so located that they do not shine into the eyes of drivers.
Consider briefly what might prove to be the ideally lit motorway of the future. A long banner of illumination lies ahead. You don't see the continuous strip of tubular lights which has been set along the lanes below the driver's eye level. There is no glare. An even distribution of light covers the road sur- face. All the headlights of cars are out. Your eyes are never assaulted. Even the color of the light has been selected to relieve eyestrain. There is no more huddling together toward the center of the road. Drivers do no more blinking and groping.
And, late at night, when traffic flow is diminished, the highway still isn't
CONTINUOUS UNIFORM ROAD SURFACE ILLUMINATION FROM CENTER CURB
Norman Bel Geddes, 1938
CONTROL STRIP
CONTINOUS TUBULAR LIGHTING
dark and treacherous. Although the system of lights goes off, it doesn't go off according to an arbitrary time schedule, but only for as long as the road- way is unused. The approach of a car causes an automatic device to turn on the lights ahead for a prescribed distance. Lights continuously turn on before each car. Behind the car, the lights turn off until another car approaches. No meters in the powerhouse are ticking off the cost of their operation when lights are not needed. When the motorway is filled to capacity, it is illuminated over its entire length. But when there is a smaller amount of traffic flow, if the space between the cars is greater than the standard distance, there is a dark unil- luminated space behind each car.
Over and beyond its efficiency, the system also provides advantages that are likely to be overlooked by pleasure drivers. These advantages result in in- creased efficiency of night trucking, the economic importance of which is growing every year. Night trucking has to operate under many difficulties. That a nationwide highway lighting system would not only expedite this traffic but also considerably increase it, is not to be doubted. Thus on the new motorway there is full use and at the same time there is economy. There is no wasting of electricity. Also there is not the wasting of time and road invest- ment that comes from inadequately lighted highways. There is not the wast- ing of property. There is not the wasting of human life.
The time will come when night driving will be regarded as actually more pleasant than driving in the daytime. For the light of the sun is variable and capricious. No one can control its direction or its intensity. But at night the automatic devices of the road will supply an ideal control of light. After all, it is not a revolutionary dream to take lights down off the poles. There is no special witchcraft in the idea of driving along a highway through a self- induced flood of light. These things can be done. There is no reason for drivers to go on being slaves at night when they could so easily be masters.
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FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE PACIFIC IN ONE DAY
I
I HE first transcontinental trips by automobile brought no great improve- ment in running time. In 1903, Sewell K. Croker left San Francisco in a two- cylinder Winton and after two months and two days he arrived in New York. The drivers who followed his pioneering example also took about two months.
As long-distance travel by car developed, it was seen that adequate motor roads were a necessity. A better-roads movement, which later developed into the Lincoln Highway Association, was founded in 1912 by Carl G. Fisher, maker of the Prest-O-Lite system of headlights. In order to dramatize this need, Mr. Fisher joined an automobile tour to the Pacific Coast, using a jumble of unmarked roads. The party's cars had to be shoveled out along the way and coaxed over the steep grades. Mr. Fisher described one of the culminating experiences which convinced him of the need for adequate roads as follows: "One night, overtaken by darkness and a drenching rain, I lost my way some nine miles from Indianapolis. At a fork in the road, my car's headlights re- vealed the base of a road sign, but the sign itself was too high to read. I shinnied up the sign pole, struck a match and read the sign. It directed me to 'Chew
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Battle- Ax Plug!' " Armed with this useful information, he continued his trip.
In the specifications for a model section of road drawn up by the Lincoln Highway Association in 1920 many sound principles were formulated. Two of them bear rather directly on Mr. Fisher's agile ascent of the chewing- tobacco sign pole. They are: 1. "The section should be lighted." 2. "Advertis- ing signs should be prohibited along the right of way." Seven years later, the Lincoln Highway between New York and San Francisco was completed and, for the first time, motor cars could travel across the continent on one highway.
The Lincoln Highway falls lamentably short of the needs of motor trans- port today. The standard right of way advocated in its specifications is 1 1 0 feet wide. Over one half of its length, it is only a two-lane road. With the ex- ception of a strip in Nebraska, the road is entirely paved, but most of the paved section is macadam rather than concrete. It is not really a continuous highway but a composite of many highways pieced together. These pieces include spurs, old junctions, a cross-patch of trails and communicating roads, and they pass through 110 cities and 200 towns during their 3056 miles. The Highway was designed to be used by cars operating at a speed of 3 5 miles an hour and by trucks at 1 0 miles an hour. Few long-distance drivers today care to drive that slowly.
The failure of the Lincoln Highway is due to lack of vision that did not allow for any substantial improvement in the motor car. It was not primarily, however, a lack of vision on the part of the people who got the Highway built ; it was a lack of vision on the part of the people who opposed it. To get the road through at all was a very difficult problem.
To operate profitably on long-distance hauling, truck drivers must main- tain 40 or more miles an hour. It is not surprising that they find inadequate for their needs a road designed for average truck speed of 1 0 miles an hour,
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and interrupted at intervals of every half mile or so by crossroads. What could show the high mortality of highways more clearly than the fact that a road only twelve years old is already a relic of the era when trucks were required to creep along at 10 miles an hour?
Besides the Lincoln Highway, three other main transcontinental routes exist, the Sante Fe Trail which parallels in part the old wagon road through the Raton Pass in New Mexico, the Broadway of America which is a scenic route from New York passing through Washington, D.C., to San Diego, and the Yellowstone Route which runs from Chicago to the National Park in Wyoming. The shortest distance from coast to coast is 2935 miles from New York to Los Angeles by the Sante Fe and Will Rogers Highways.
In addition to these major transcontinental roads, there are a great many other motor roads which the transcontinental traveler can use. There are one hundred and seventeen numbered routes running east and west for varying distances, and one hundred and seven numbered routes between the nation's northern and southern boundaries. The nomenclature adopted for national highways gives odd numbers to routes running north and south, such as U.S. Highway Number One along the Atlantic seaboard. Even-numbered routes run east and west, as U.S. Highway Number Two, from Eastern Maine to Glacier Park in Northwest Montana. From Rouses' Point, New York, to Sault Ste. Marie on the northern peninsula of Michigan there is a gap in this U.S. Highway, for the shortest distance between these two points lies over Canadian roads.
An official road guide book of 1915 grew lyrical in its attempts to lure motorists westward to the San Francisco World's Fair over the macadamized turnpikes of the East, the fair-weather roads of the Middle West and the natural gravel of Wyoming. The hazards of travel near Fish Springs, Utah, certainly did not frighten the writer of the guide book: "If trouble is experi-
[145]
enced, build a sagebrush fire. Mr. Thomas will come with a team. He can see you 20 miles off." John Thomas was an honest man. He had a fixed price. It did not matter whether one or four cars were stuck in the mud; he would haul all of them out for the same price — ten dollars. Mr. Thomas, however, abhorred arguments, and he always had the last word. If the captive motorists ventured to dispute the fee, Mr. Thomas merely raised it to twenty or twenty- five dollars. These were roads which, as Mr. Crocker had demonstrated twelve years before, could be traversed by automobile. But they were certainly not roads designed to facilitate motor travel.
Even today, in cars that can go 70 miles an hour, many motorists take ten days to cross the continent. It is not a question of straight transcontinental travel only. The same conditions exist on north-south routes, or on any long inter-city routes. The 1940 motor car is capable of carrying goods or pas- sengers at sustained speeds on extremely long trips. Yet only a very small percentage of trucks or passenger cars in the United States is driven on long trips. Drivers are not deterred by lack of faith in their cars. But it costs too much — in time, money and energy — to do a long-distance automobile run in the country today. Undoubtedly you or friends of yours have made the trip from coast to coast by car. You will have noticed that the highways along which you drive are by no means the undeviating ways indicated by the deli- cate lines on the nation's road maps. They are merely connecting links from one town to another which, if followed with sufficient diligence and reference
OFF TO THE WORLD'S FAIR— 1915
Brown Bros.
to road maps, bring you eventually to the coast. Even with two or more drivers relieving each other to keep the car moving night and day, it is not possible to make the trip by car as quickly as by train. Average time for the trip by motor is longer than by rail chiefly because the highways used also serve local traffic, which has a very different pace and purpose from that of the cross-country driver.
From an inquisitive tourist's point of view, there may be possible advan- tages in zigzagging one's way from coast to coast, and coming in contact with a maximum number of one's fellow citizens en route. However, few cross- country drivers who have made the trip, either for business or pleasure, express this sentiment. Travel by road, especially in the case of merchandise, ought to have many superiorities over any other kind of travel. The car and the truck are both capable of sustained high speeds. The pleasure car is under the driver's individual control, thus eliminating the irksome necessity of conforming to prearranged schedules and routes. And as for merchandise, one pound of truck will haul two pounds of freight, while in order to haul the same two pounds of freight on the railroad, it takes eight pounds of freight car.
Engineers could readily design trucks, buses and passenger cars to operate at 100 miles an hour, if proper roads were avail- able for their use. At such speed, the trip from Chi- cago to San Francisco could be made in about eighteen hours. If new routes are to be planned
Margaret Bourke-White
TRUCKING— OR MONKEY BUSINESS
SKIMMING
THE TIP OF
THE PALISADES
Falrchlld
today, they should not become obsolete in another twenty years. Therefore designers should think in terms of highways that can be safely used even at 100 miles an hour. Such highways are possible. From the motorist's point of view, the idea of driving at such speed, even with safety, is not yet especially popular, but to no one today does it seem as fantastic, immoral or suicidal as driving at 5 0 miles an hour seemed to buggy drivers two generations ago. In those days, trains ran through the countryside as fast as the average motor car does today. Now airplanes carrying passengers at 200 miles an hour are com- monplace. And yet the same argument persists that was advanced by the driver who whipped up old Dobbin saying, "Anyone who drives faster than I do is driving too fast. A body can't stand it."
It is just as short-sighted for people today to say that cars should not drive at 100 miles an hour as it was of George Washington's physician to warn him that anyone driving over 1 5 miles an hour would inevitably die of heart- failure. Incidentally, George Washington was never in danger on this account. Average stagecoach speed on his travels was 4 miles an hour.
The sensation of speed is relative. No family now driving in a closed car, on a smooth straight road at 5 0 miles an hour, experiences the sensation of wind- blown, dust-raising dare-deviltry which made the family group in a 1910 open-model Buick hold on for their lives, as the car achieved a nerve- and spine-racking burst of speed at 1 2 miles an hour over a rutted roadway.
In 1848, the railroad revolutionized man's concept of speed. A train burn- ing pine knots ran from Boston to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in twenty-six minutes, at the hitherto unheard-of speed of a mile a minute. This was not an ordinary passenger run but a demonstration. The daring newspaper reporters who made the trip "commended themselves to God, and were lying down on the floor where the chance of survival seemed better." It took a week to repair the tracks after this venture, but the concept of a "mile a minute" immedi-
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SPEED IS RELATIVE— SEA BISCUIT BEATS WAR ADMIRA
ately became firmly established in the popular imagination as top speed. This popular con- cept became an incentive to faster travel. To- day it is as antiquated a measure for top speed as was the 10-mile-an-hour pace at which the first automobile race was run.
Early in 1939, H. Lloyd Child, test pilot, exceeded all known speed records in a dive of more than 575 miles an hour, starting at an altitude of 22,000 feet. No one proposes to drive an automobile that fast, though John Cobb has driven a racing car at 368 miles an hour, which is faster than a shell shot from a mortar. In an airplane, speed is a safety factor: it is speed which increases the airplane's ability to sustain itself. On today's highways, because of the ever-present chance of coming into contact with another vehicle or a stationary object, speed translates itself into a danger factor. But in 1960, 100 miles an hour will seem no faster than the motor speeds which we now take for granted.
To convert all American roads into high-speed superhighways would be both impracticable and undesirable. But a certain number of motorways where safe, fast driving and an uninterrupted trip would be possible are never- theless an immediate need. By stimulating the use of motor vehicles, such new motorways would amply pay the cost of construction and would serve as models for the future. For centuries we were content with springless wagons. Is that a reason why we should continue to put up with slow roads?
Imagine a man who wants to drive from the Atlantic Coast to California, not on pleasure bent nor on one of the fancier varieties of business, but in dead
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earnest on a plain job. Say he drives a truck. He has some highly perishable freight to transport. It has to get across the country quickly. It's nothing more nor less than twelve barrels of oysters that have been hauled out of Chesapeake Bay the day the season opened. The jobber in California can't wait for rail transport. He can't pay for air transport. So he is dependent on high- speed trucking.
At 5:15 in the afternoon, with the trailer loaded, the truckman and his relief driver climb aboard. From the oyster pier the route lies over the im- proved secondary highways which serve as feeders to the motorway. Twenty- five miles outside Washington they pick up the motorway feeder lanes, built as a unit with the motorway and having the same construction and design char- acteristics. As the truck bears to the right from the secondary highway at the feeder point and enters the feeder lane, the driver immediately feels the auto- matic car control take effect. As it approaches the motorway on a long sweep- ing curve, the car automatically accelerates to a steady 5 0 miles an hour, ready to merge with the continuous flow of traffic on the through lane. For a mo-
FEEDER LANES TO THE MOTORWAY
Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
ment, the truck parallels the motorway on the feeder lane and then is auto- matically slipped into a gap in the outside of the four lanes provided for 50- mile traffic. There was a break in the automatically spaced line of cars which allowed him to enter. Otherwise the speed control on the feeder lane would have held the car back until a space was available. A slight delay wouldn't have bothered the driver greatly because he knows that once he is on the motorway there is never any delay. This delay would mean no more to him than that which an airplane pilot experiences when, after taking off, his plane climbs carefully and slowly to the desired altitude before getting up full speed. As a transatlantic steamer makes slow progress leaving New York harbor until it reaches the open sea lanes, it may sometimes be necessary for a car going on a long journey on the motorway to encounter a short delay be- fore reaching the uninterrupted high-speed lanes.
Ahead of the truck, the motorway is bathed in an even glow of light; car headlights are extinguished; the driver can't help wondering how he ever found his way about in the dark benighted era when each car carried angry, stabbing lamps that blinded the other fellow. As he speeds along on a straight- line course, cutting through the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies, he can feel the control mechanism of the motorway maintaining his truck in its lane. The nearest car in his lane is 1 5 0 feet away. On the right lies a wide right-of-way strip, beautifully landscaped. On the left, alongside the fourth lane, is a wide strip of grass beyond which he sees two more lanes of cars rush- ing past. They are the 7 5 -mile-per-hour lanes. Beyond that, with another wide grass strip intervening, is the single 100-mile lane. The foliage of trees and shrubs conceals a similar eastbound right of way paralleling this west- bound one. All types of motorized vehicles use this motorway — heavy trucks like the oyster dealer's, small farm trucks carrying produce to market, trailer trucks similar to a Diesel train, large and small passenger cars, tourist trailers,
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— -^JF
E NATIONAL MOTORWAY CROSSES THE GREAT DIVIDE WITHOUT SPEED REDUCTION
double-decked transcontinental buses with comfortable lounge space. All move steadily and easily, without dust, danger or delay.
The driver presses a button on the instrument panel which will maneuver him into the 7 5 -mile lane at the first opportunity. All the way across the country there is no danger of sideswiping or bumping or of intersections. The whole thing is managed by automatic car control. Later on, he shifts into the 100-mile lane.
He has a lot of time to look around. He notices feeder lanes from other cities leading into the motorway. But he never has to slow down for these cars to get on the motorway. Never at any time does he have to slow down for any reason. Crossroads underpass the motorway. Long-distance drivers are not the only ones to benefit from such a motorway. Local traffic flows more freely, because local roads no longer bear the burden of through traffic for which they were not designed. There are no visible lights. There are no road hogs. The motorway has taken all the irritation out of driving. The road has met the automobile at last on its own terms. The oyster dealer bought his truck for speed and reliability. The motorway has also given him safety, comfort and economy.
Midnight. The relief driver has taken the wheel while his friend sleeps — not sitting up, but comfortably, in a bed in the truck cab. Neither raucous horn blowing for a right of way nor squeal of brakes wakens him. A sign flashes, telling the driver that Chicago is 47 miles due north. He checks up on his clock; it's only 1:30. He has passed Pittsburgh and Fort Wayne with- out realizing it — they lie outside the route of the motorway. The shortest highway route in 1940 between Washington and Chicago was 697 miles. If he could have managed 45 miles an hour — which he could not have done because of all the cities and towns through which the highway passed — the trip would have taken at least fifteen and a half hours. It was a fifteen-hour
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trip on the train. But the motorway connecting Washington and Chicago is only 625 miles, exclusive of the feeder highways from both cities. Therefore, driving at 100 miles an hour while on the motorway and allowing ample time to approach and leave the motorway, the whole trip takes only nine hours.
The motorway does not actually enter either city. Its terminal points are situated so as to permit feeder roads to distribute traffic and avoid congestion.
The truck speeds westward. There is no need to slow down for the 2 -mile bridge over the Mississippi or for any of the intersections with other motorway routes.
Then behind them, dawn begins to break. There is a great sight to be seen to the eastward as they fly over the great plains of Nebraska. As the morning wears on, the hot, dusty atmosphere is unbearable, but in the air-conditioned truck cab the men are cool and comfortable.
At regular 20 -mile intervals along the motorway there are combination gas stations, emergency stations, restaurants and hotels. A driver always knows these facilities will be available ahead of him. At one of these points, the oyster-laden truck automatically transfers to the 7 5 -mile lane and glides into the station from the transition lane leading to the 50 -mile speed route. They stop for a light breakfast while the truck is being refueled and checked.
Speeding toward the west again on the 100-mile lane, after the short rest, through Northern Colorado and on past Salt Lake City, the driver notices a slight but barely perceptible upgrade.
Now a voice over the dashboard speaker tells the driver he is entering the Rockies.
Through the haze to westward, the first profiles of great mountains appear. It is clear that ahead are conditions which made new problems for motorway engineers. The four essentials that were built into the motorway always stay the same: safety, speed, comfort and economy. But these essentials have to be
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Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
CONVENIENT EMERGENCY STATIONS ARE LOCATED ALONG THE MOTORWAY
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Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
MOTORWAYS WILL UNCOVER MORE OF NATURE'S RICHES [158]
MOTORWAY ROUTES SEPARATE IN THE MOUNTAIN FOOTHILLS TO MAINTAIN THEIR ECONOMICAL SPEED Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
handled separately here in relation to the particular demands of each of the three speed lanes.
Something happens now that they are in the foothills. Ahead is the Great Salt Lake. The 100- and 7 5 -mile lanes draw together as the course continues straight toward the body of water. Next the westbound lanes contact the eastbound lanes of the same speeds. The 50 -mile lanes, however, swing out around the lake. The two 100-mile lanes gradually ramp up over the four 75- mile lanes. All six of these lanes continue straight across the lake. The 75- mile lanes form the lower deck of a bridge with the 100-mile lanes forming the upper deck.
Across the body of water a second thing hap- pens. The 7 5 -mile lanes are emerging from be- neath the faster ones. The increasing grade has ne- cessitated the separation. These 100-mile lanes must rise at a lesser grade than the others in order to maintain their uniform high speed. The 7 5 -milers veer off slightly and form a two-directional system
THREE SPEEDS— THREE ROUTES
Futurama Photo by General Motors
of their own, on a route adapted to their specific requirements.
Each of the three groups of lanes has its own speed, its own particular gradi- ent and its established curve radius. All three factors remain constant.
The 50 -mile lanes are climbing from the valley floor. They resemble the best highways of 1940 — except, of course, that they are designed to maintain maximum-minimum speed and constant grade. They by-pass many natural obstacles, as the old highways do, and describe a somewhat circuitous route. The 7 5 -mile lanes are intermediate — a compromise between the methods of the 50 and the 100.
The 100- and 7 5 -mile lanes climb on a much straighter route than the fifties — using cuts, fills, bridges and tunnels — but still, where the terrain de- mands it, they give way in curves of great radius and follow the more ad- vantageous features of the land. All curves are so gentle that they have no more effect on driving than a straightaway. The 50 -mile lanes are best for tourists who want to en- joy all the beauties of the scenery, or who want to leave the motorway oc-
16 MILES » MILES MILES
100 MILE MOTORWAY 75 MILE MOTORWAY 50 MILE MOTORWAY
ZERO MILES
Norman Bel Geddes, I935
MOTORWAYS IN MOUNTAINOUS COUNTRY WILL BE LAID OUT ACCORDING TO SPEED REQUIREMENTS
casionally by means of a feeder road, to linger at one of the resort hotels. The 7 5 -mile lanes are best for the conventional through traveler. But the 100- mile lanes are for those who mean business — those who have to get across the Great Divide in the shortest time.
Suddenly the motorway enters a tunnel. There is a surprise here. It isn't the usual dark kind of tunnel. It has been cut so close to the side of the moun- tain that its outer walls have openings cut into it for the admission of light and air. There is no need of headlights, no gasoline haze, no stifling air.
From the tunnel mouth, the lane whirls onto a suspension bridge straight for the next massive mountain of granite. Below to the right is the 75-mile-
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lane system, swinging along the upper reaches of the gorge. Considerably farther down the valley runs the silver ribbon of the 50 -mile lanes. That val- ley down there has always been fertile but it was inaccessible until recently.
Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
HIGH SPEED ROUTES TUNNEL, BRIDGE AND CLIMB WHILE LOW SPEED ROUTES WIND IN THE VALLEY
Now there are grazing slopes and terraced farms and newly developed lands: all made possible because the motorway has opened it up. Far away a white wisp of smoke marks a train. The air grows sharp and sparkling. The driver barely notices the steady climbing because the grade is so gradual. A cliff looms ahead. The only way to get around it would be to hang the highway upon the face of the cliff — and that is exactly what has been done.
Where the motorway runs through country susceptible to heavy snow and drifts, the road surface is of expanded metal with gratings that allow the snow to fall through, and it is treated with a chemical to melt it. In other
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sections, a chemical is auto- matically sprayed over the road surface from hydrants along the right of way, melt- ing and flushing the snow as it falls and preventing it from becoming packed and dry.
The next sign that blinks past tells the story: "ALTI- TUDE 7,000 feet."
After a short run across the roof of the world, the 7 5 -mile route joins up again. Before long the 50 -mile does likewise but it has used triple the mileage of the hundreds in the meantime. As glittering peaks drop behind them, they sail along through stands of spruce, catching glimpses of lower and lower valleys before them, until, in a vast prospect, they come out on the western margin of the continent.
By 4 :4 5 the radio is remind- ing the truck driver that just ahead is a transition point where he must go through
Futurama Photo by Richard Garrison
ON TOP OF THE WORLD
deceleration lanes to reduce his speed to 5 0 miles and so turn off on the feeder for San Francisco. On a wide express boulevard, automatically controlled just like the motorway, he slips into the city in time for delivery and dinner. He has traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific, on land, in twenty-four hours! It may sound fantastic. At least, it sounds remote. But it can be done. It won't be done all at once. It won't be done in a year's time. But it will be done. The need for quicker and safer and more economical transportation de- mands it. The imagination and courage of America will attend to it.
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ELIMINATE GRAFT AND DOUBLE HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION
UST as important as the technical and physical side of highway building is the human side. Throughout the history of transportation, there has almost always been a conflict between designers and technicians on the one hand, and grafters and profiteers on the other hand. To know roads, one should go behind the scenes of road building to examine the elements of control — those social institutions and agencies which are in charge of the execution of the public's demands for quicker, safer, more comfortable and more economi- cal means of transportation. One should know how governmental bodies work and have worked, where the money for roads comes from, where it goes and where it ought to go from now on.
Twice as much money is spent for roads today as is justified by results. This is a strong statement. But it rests on two major facts: inefficiency and graft. Of course, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish one from the other. Graft is often passed off as inefficiency. It is inevitably covered up and glossed over. The forms of graft which affect roads vary from outright robbery and bribery to more subtle forms which often go undetected. "Waste"
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PORTRAIT OF ANY MOTORIST
H.I.Williams
and inefficient construction always have been and are today all too prevalent. As a result, roads cost too much to build, wear out too quickly, require con- stant repair and unnecessary maintenance costs.
Possibly even more ruinous than the outright theft of highway funds is the "political road" — the road routed not where it can be of most service, but where it will most profitably serve the interests of those in political authority. This practice is reminiscent of gerrymandering, a process named after Gov- ernor Gerry of Massachusetts, who in 1812 divided Essex County into a salamander-shaped district which served no purposes other than those of his political party. When Thomas Jefferson was President, he received a letter from his Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, who urged that the national highway then under consideration should be routed through Wash- ington County, Pennsylvania. The Secretary argued that Washington County "gives a uniform majority of about 2,000 votes in our favor, and if this be thrown by reason of this road in a wrong scale, we will infallibly lose the State of Pennsylvania at the next election." You can look up any history book and find that Mr. Gallatin's party won the next election. But you don't have to look up any books to find how the Old National Pike was routed. You can drive over the site of this road today — where it ran squarely through the strategic Washington County.
A National Transportation Program, published two years ago by the Trans- port Association of America, stated that: "In the recent Highway Cost Study conducted by the State of Illinois, it was found that that State, which has more miles of rural concrete pavement than any other, will be obliged to begin in 1938 with a program of reconstruction many years in advance of that antic- ipated, and for which no provision has been made. Recent studies indicate that at current prices and vehicle tax rates, all contemplated motor vehicle revenues will be consumed in annual payments against principal and interest
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on highway bonds and the reconstruction of existing roads, and still leave an annual deficit of more than $6,000,000. The indebtedness in question will not be completely paid until 1957, yet much of it represents the construction of the 3300 miles of concrete roads which must be rebuilt over the next ten years. Conditions in Illinois are doubtless representative of those which exist in other States."
Unfortunately, graft and inefficiency are not new developments. Perhaps
HIGHWAY FUNDS DIVERSION AND ITS ROUGH EDGES
Portland Cement Assn.
if they were, their novelty would attract the public's attention and something decisive might be done about them.
Primitive trade routes had at least one thing in common with modern high- ways. Both have been a means of extorting an infinite number of penalties from the hapless traveler. Rulers of states have always found highways an inexhaustible source of revenue. Robber bands, sometimes in an unholy alli- ance with the authorities, snatched easy profits with a flourish of a sword or
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the threat of a gun. There was never anything in American history which was akin to the organized robbery of the rich old caravans in Europe and Asia. But we have our tradition of stagecoach and train robberies. And the automobile highway has inherited that tradition. In Toledo, Ohio, this situation became so serious that the police, over a considerable period of time, turned off the city traffic lights after dark because so many motorists were being held up when they stopped for red lights. But this is only the most obvious form of highway holdup. Roads in America since pre-Revolutionary days have been paved with some good and many highly questionable intentions.
In 1811, the Federal government undertook construction of the Cumber- land Road, from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling on the Ohio River, its first big venture in road building. State interest in highways started ten years later, when Kentucky set up the first State Highway Department. Public in- terest in highways and Federal highway activities languished over the next fifty years, due to the interest in railroads and their development. In 1893 the Office of Road Inquiry in Washington was organized, having very few powers and acting chiefly in an educational and advisory capacity. This resulted from the resourceful crusade of A. G. Batchelder and Colonel A. A. Pope, each of whom became known as the father of good roads. Most of the interest in roads and highways during the nineties was a result of the efforts of the League of American Wheelmen and the national craze of bicycling.
At the beginning of the twentieth century there were only ten state high- way departments in the country, and it was not until 1908, when Maryland established the principle that highway routes were subject to state control, and that paved highways should at least connect county seats, that there was any thought of state highway planning. In 1916, the idea that the central government had certain duties toward interstate transportation was embodied in the Federal Aid Highway Act, which provided for Federal aid grants for
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road construction on condition that the states match these appropriations dollar for dollar. The immediate basis for this was the Federal government's interest in the moving of mails and of troops. Under this plan as amended and subsequently enlarged by relief legislation, over three billion dollars have been authorized by the Federal government to aid roads built under state super- vision. Under the Highway Act of 1921, no state could receive Federal aid unless its highway department collaborated with the Secretary of Agriculture to frame a national system of interrelated highways.
The Office of Road Inquiry subsequently was changed to the Federal Bureau of Public Roads, and in 1939 its name was again changed, this time to the Public Roads Administration. This bureau does not have the authority to design or build roads. Its functions are simply to carry on research and ex- periments on all aspects of highway construction, to investigate and approve state projects, and to allocate funds, examining and supervising state high- ways on which Federal money has been spent.
Where do these millions of dollars expended by the state and Federal gov- ernments on roads come from? The motorist pays, and pays in full. From the moment he purchases his car, he automatically begins to supply the revenue. It has been estimated that 10 to 15 per cent of the purchase price of his car represents taxes — direct and indirect. The tax on his car and tires, registration and license fees are only his initial contribution. An enormous and continuous form of revenue derives from gasoline taxes, as well as road and bridge tolls. There is no lack of income from roads. It amounts to one-seventh of the total taxes collected by Federal, state and local governments. Yet, although one and a half billion dollars are paid by motorists in taxes each year, three miles out of every four in this country are still dirt roads.
Obviously what has been happening all along is that the motorist is not get- ting back, in the form of roads and their maintenance, anywhere near all the
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money he pays in the form of taxes. There are many reasons why he isn't getting it back. The most harmless of these is that the forty-eight state highway departments have not yet formulated a uniform accounting system. It is very hard to figure out how much has been put back into roads.
Under the present system of highway finance, little considera- tion is allowed for highways as one of America's most vital public utilities. The Federal government is contributing vast amounts of money to them, without the authority to plan or direct construc- tion. Among states which are in straitened financial circum- stances, there is a growing practice to divert highway funds to other uses.
Diversion might simply be called a matter of financial juggling. About twenty-three years ago the public first became aware that motor vehicle tax revenues and other highway funds were being used for "general purposes." At that time the sum involved was about $700,000. But by 1935, Congressman Cartwright, Chair- man of the House Committee on Roads, charged that the diver- sion had reached such an extent that instead of spending all motor revenues on highway building, maintenance and the retirement of obligations, in that year diversion reached the "staggering sum" of $146,449,711. This amount of money could build 300 miles of the most advanced type of divided highways with grade separation at all crossings — more miles of this type of
|s*
highway than are in existence in the United States today after | thirty years of road building. Instead, over $86,000,000 of it went into general state funds, $15,000,000 into relief, $31,000,- 000 to education, "and the rest into airports, oyster propagation,
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Above: ONE FUEL BUT TWO Below: IMPROVEMENTS TAKE THEIR TOLL
GOOD HIGHWAYS HAVE BEEN BUILT
United States Department of Agriculture
etc." Congressman Cartwright summed up the situation by saying: "Wearing the decoration of the double cross, the American motorist, some twenty-five million of him, arises to ask why he should continue to stand for taxation without representation — a small matter about which America once fought a war."
Two years later, a highway engineer and President of the Portland Cement Association, Frank T. Sheets, speaking at an annual meeting of the Greater New York Safety Council, also charged that a high percentage of highway funds was being misused throughout the nation. He said, "We are now col- lecting in motor imposts (license fees, miscellaneous fees and motor fuel taxes) about one billion dollars a year. . . . But what have we been doing
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with these funds?" He explained that $147,000,000 a year is being diverted from highway use, and another $144,000,000 a year is being handed back to political subdivisions to be expended without any supervision by the states and without any definite plan.
Governor J. M. Futrell of Arkansas, several years ago, became aware that his state's highway funds were mysteriously disappearing. He flatly expressed his belief that the proceeds of Arkansas highway bonds aggregating $163,- 000,000 had not found their way into actual road construction. "It is my opinion," he said, "that a fair appraisal of our roads will show a 50 per cent value of the bond issues. Properly invested, $81,500,000 would have given us a better system of highways, and, certainly, a better constructed one." The Governor did not state specifically what had happened to the money, merely remarking that it had gone "like water."
Frequently such bonds were bought by investors in other parts of the coun- try. Local citizens were so pleased with the sudden influx of ready money that they did not trouble to count the cost. Nor did they make any effort to pre- vent dishonest administration of highway funds. The citizens who used and paid for the roads began to realize how thoroughly they were cheated when many miles of road crumbled after just a year of use. A report of the High- way Audit Commission of Arkansas indicated overcharges of over $4,000,- 000 on one job of $10,000,000!
Economically and ethically, diversion of highway funds can only lead to disaster. The result of it is that, as Chester H. Gray, Director of the National Highway Users Conference, wrote, "States which are now guilty of diversion of highway funds see their roads deteriorating." In several states, constitu- tional amendments have been introduced to forbid the use of highway funds for any except highway purposes.
Then comes the large and shadowy subject of graft. Graft, after all, is just
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ONE-HALF OF A STATE'S ROAD FUNDS— GONE LIKE WATER
another kind of diversion — the use of road funds not for the interest of the people, but for the interests of certain individuals.
Wastage of highway funds is a time-honored practice. As far back as 1831, Lemuel H. Arnold, a candidate for Governor of Rhode Island, was accused of instigating a fraudulent deal involving the Providence and Pawtucket Turnpike. It was charged that as members of the General Assembly, he and an associate had tried to get the Turnpike to buy up, at an inflated figure, a section of road of which they were trustees. They were further to receive a heavy annual cut of the tolls paid and were to pad their maintenance costs.
A fantastic case of graft was the grandiose scheme devised in 1871 by New
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York's master corruptionist, William H. Tweed, to carve a monumental boulevard out of the wild ledges from Nyack to Hook Mountain, where a scenic hotel was to be built. Contractors grew rich on the project, but some- how they were never required to produce the road. Finally work was begun in earnest — in 1939.
The same theme, an air with variations, is heard at regular intervals in al- most every state in the Union. The highway construction companies and