interstates.html

On July 12, 1954, President Eisenhower put forward a plan for an interstate highway system. From the article:

"Highway Act of 1954, which authorized $175 million for an interstate system, to be distributed on a 60-40 federal-state basis. Signing it, however, Eisenhower called it merely "one effective forward step." More, he believed, was needed.

In July 1954, he brought up the idea again, and a conference of state governors at Lake George, New York, provided the setting. Eisenhower was unable to attend because of his sister-in-law's death, so he sent Vice President Richard Nixon to deliver his message to the governors.

The legislation he had signed a few months earlier, he told them, was a "good start," but a more comprehensive interstate network of highways was needed to reduce the number of highway deaths and injuries, cut down on delays because of detours and traffic jams, reduce the amount of highway-related litigation, and allow more efficient truck transportation of goods. And, he added, the system was needed to address "the appalling inadequacies to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come." Eisenhower also proposed a self-liquidating financing system that would avoid debt.

The proposal excited the governors, and the President named a special panel to study the problem. Headed by retired Gen. Lucius D. Clay, it gave its report to the President early in 1955, and he forwarded it to Congress. The panel called for a Federal Highway Corporation that would issue bonds to build the system and for a gas tax to be used to retire the bonds over three decades. The cost of building an interstate system of highways would be about $27 billion, it said, with $25 billion of it coming from the issuance of the bonds.

Members of Congress, however, had their own ideas. Legislation calling for an interstate system with 90-percent federal funding was defeated even after intense efforts to strike a compromise that would have wide appeal.

In his State of the Union speech in January 1956, Eisenhower tried again. And the Bureau of Public Roads issued a book, General Location of National System of Interstate Highways, that showed where interstates would be located in and around the nation's largest metropolitan areas. Opponents to the funding mechanism in 1955 were now agreeing to some increases in the gas tax.

With Eisenhower standing firm for legislation to create the interstate system, Congress went back to work on it, and finally produced legislation that called for 90 percent federal funding, with money coming from a Highway Trust Fund that received the revenue from the federal gasoline tax.

The final version also reflected a compromise on how the funds would be apportioned among the states, and it contained provisions on uniform design standards, inclusion of existing toll roads, and the wage rate to be paid on these federal construction projects. It also permitted use of federal funds to purchase the rights-of-way for the roads and allowed two-lane segments, although later legislation required all parts of the system to be four-lane, limited-access highways.

On June 26, 1956, both the Senate and the House gave final approval to the compromise version and sent it to Eisenhower, who was in Walter Reed Army Hospital with an intestinal ailment. There, he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 privately, without ceremony, on June 29, 1956."