Looking for good schooltime , good wellness , good morals , and unspoilt clock time ? Well , then you ’d need to line up serious roads first , according to the National Highway Association . Which is why the NHA drew up the first proposed highway programme in 1913 .
In 1911 , the National Highways Association ( NHA ) was build to advance the maturation of a transnational system of roads in the United States . Two years later , under the slogan “ expert roads for everyone ! ” the NHA put fore a program outlining a 50,000 - mile web of highway , which Charles Henry Davis , president and cofounder of the NHA , describedas “ a broad and comprehensive organisation of National Highways , build , owned , and maintained by the National Government . ” Davis go on :
To propose the construction of fifty thousand naut mi of National Highways may seem to the unthinking a rotatory thought , yet fifty thousand miles of Highway is but little more than two per cent of the full route fuel consumption rate of this body politic … These highways have not been but draw upon a mathematical function with a pencil in the script of a theorist who decided “ it would be a good thing to have a road here ! ” They have been accurately and carefully located by trained and experienced road locomotive engineer , mould with a big and stark billet and drafting force for more than four months .
The map of the proposed highway organization used cherry , dispirited , and icteric to designate “ Main , ” “ Trunk , ” and “ Link ” National Highways , severally , and appears below , by way of the World Digital Library ( WDL ) . Click the upper left manus corner of the image , to see it in close detail :
According to theWDL :
This organization was to be draw up of six main national highways , 13 bole national main road , and 40 radio link highways . The radio link highways , the NHA explained , would connect “ the Mains and Trunks ” and reach out “ in all directions until the country as a whole is overcompensate with almost a wanderer - web tracery of highways . ”
… Besides issuing brochures and circulars draw a bead on at convincing citizen of the need for a national road organisation , the NHA was a fertile manufacturer of maps . cartographical work was done at an spot in South Yarmouth , Massachusetts , where approximately 40 people were utilise on [ Davis ’ property ] . Davis conceive that these maps would be helpful to a national highways commissioning that he hop would be established and that they would attend the land in integrate their roads into a internal system of rules .
In 1915 , the NHA would expound its visual sense of a transcontinental highway system considerably . A new series of maps depicted a 150,000 - stat mi mesh , “ free-base on a four - fold organisation of national , state , county , and town or township highways and roads . ” Their designs reflect not only the NHA ’s aspiration to unite the political and administrative divisions of the country ( at the top of each mapping are tabulated estimates of the numbers and pct of people living in counties serviced by proposed main road system ) , but the political climate of the time . In an age when good road meant right schools , church , health , morals , homes , farms , crops , time , towns , and fun ( at least , fit in to the NHA ) , these maps endeavored to associate “ the suit of good roads with the ‘ preparedness ’ debate underway at that time concerning potential treatment by the United States in World War I as an ally of Britain and France . ” As Davis put it :
The National Highways Association conceive that , when established , these home highways will increase the wealth , the magnate , and the importance of this land as nothing else can do besides that which has brought civilization to the savage , wealth to the poor , and happiness to all — GOOD ROADS .
While Congress never embraced any of the design proposed by the NHA , the WDL notes that “ the organisation and its maps facilitate to further the cause of a home route mesh . ” ( It is move how similar these initial plans are to today ’s advanced infrastructure . ) Ultimately , the body politic ’s first Union highway would not be adopt until November 1926 , when the American Association of State Highway Officials approved the plans for first nationwide system of numbered main road , pictured here :
[ WDL|FHWA ]
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