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"Together, the united forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear - United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Feb. 22, 1955 By the late 1930s, the pressure for construction of transcontinental superhighways was building. It even reached the White House, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt repeatedly expressed interest in construction of a network of toll superhighways as a way of providing more jobs for people out of work.
He thought three east-west and three north south routes would be sufficient. Congress, too, decided to explore the concept. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938 directed the chief of the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) to study the feasibility of a six route toll network. The resultant two-part report, Toll Roads and Free Roads, was based on the statewide highway planning surveys and analysis.
Part I of the report asserted that the amount of transcontinental traffic was insufficient to support a network of toll superhighways. Some routes could be self-supporting as toll roads, but most highways in a national toll network would not. Part II, "A Master Plan for Free Highway Development," recommended a 43,000-kilometer (km) nontoll interregional highway network. The interregional highways would follow existing roads wherever possible (thereby preserving the investment in earlier stages of improvement). More than two lanes of traffic would be provided where traffic exceeds 2,000 vehicles per day, while access would be limited where entering vehicles would harm the freedom of movement of the main stream of traffic.
Within the large cities, the routes should be depressed or elevated, with the former preferable. Limited-access belt lines were needed for traffic wishing to bypass the city and to link radial expressways directed toward the center of the city. Inner belts surrounding the central business district would link the radial expressways while providing a way around the district for vehicles not destined for it. On April 27, 1939, Roosevelt transmitted the report to Congress. He recommended that Congress consider action on:
[A] special system of direct interregional highways, with all necessary connections through and around cities, designed to meet the requirements of the national defense and the needs of a growing peacetime traffic of longer range.
The president's political opponents considered the "master plan" to be "another ascent into the stratosphere of New Deal jitterbug economics," as one critic put it. Overall, however, reaction was favorable within the highway community although some observers thought the plan lacked the vision evident in the popular "Futurama" exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The exhibit's designer, Norman Bel Geddes, imagined the road network of 1960 - 14-lane superhighways crisscrossing the nation, with vehicles moving at speeds as high as 160 km per hour. Radio beams in the cars regulated the spacing between them to ensure safety. In the cities, traffic moved on several levels - the lowest for service, such as pulling into parking lots, the highest for through traffic moving 80 km per hour. Although the "magic motorways" shown in Futurama were beyond the technological and financial means of the period, they helped popularize the concept of interstate highways. With America on the verge of joining the war under way in Europe, the time for a massive highway program had not arrived. However, the president was already thinking about the post-war period. He feared resumption of the Depression if American soldiers returned from the war and were unable to find jobs. A major highway program could be part of the answer. On April 14, 1941, the president appointed a National Interregional Highway Committee to investigate the need for a limited system of national highways. Thomas H. MacDonald, BPR chief, chaired the committee and appointed Herbert S. Fairbank, BPR's Information Division chief, as secretary.
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