Modern Highway Development
The period from 1920 at least into the late 1970s might well be called the "automobile age/' for during this period highway transportation assumed a dominant role in America and the rest of the developed world. These countries can well be described as "nations on wheels. A 15-fold increase in several measures of highway activity from 1920 to 1979 and a tripling between 1950 and 1979. .
Because of inflation, the plot of highway expenditures on is not re¬alistic. In the years from 1950 to 1979, the dollar cost of appropriate units of highway construction and maintenance quadrupled. This is a geometric in¬crease of about 5% per year. Unfortunately, inflation continues and at a consid¬erably higher, rate.
To give added perspective on the effects of inflation, expenditures converted to 1977 dollars.This illustrates among other things that real expenditures for highways were substantially lower in the late 1970s than in the 1960s, in spite of substantial" increases in highway use. Values taken from this cost curve and that for motor vehicle registration show that the real annual expenditure for highways per motor vehicle, stated in 1977 dollars, had fallen from about $270 to $160 between 1950 and 1979.
It also shows that during the 1920 to 1979 period, road and street mileage increased relatively little, possibly 20%. This growth resulted mainly because'new roads and streets were built to serve areas where land use became more intensive, plus the addition of a relatively small mileage of major arteries, including freeways, on new alignments.
From 1920 to 1935; highway development was focused primarily on the completion of a network of all-weather rural roads comparable to the street sys¬tems undertaken by local governments. By 1935 cross-country travel by auto¬mobile in almost any direction was possible. Since 1935 highway activities in rural areas have been devoted mainly to an attempt to provide facilities of higher standards and with greater capacity and load-carrying ability. During the same period, increasing attention has been focused on urban areas, which have been struck simultaneously by rapidly increasing population, lower population densities resulting from a "flight to the suburbs/' and a shift from mass transportation to the private automobile. Indications are that only minor additions to road mileage will be made in the future.
Title Post: Modern Highway Development
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Author: aditya
Rating: 100% based on 99998 ratings. 5 user reviews.
Author: aditya
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