historic context of maryland highway bridges built between 1948 ...

SECTIONTHREEHistoric Contextcovered by concrete until the pier was fully formed. Greiner engineers used a cantilever designfor the main span of the 11,446-foot bridge. (Bruder 2000:14-15).The 1930s also saw construction activities focused on the elimination of railroad grade crossingswith federal funds helping state highway departments cover the costs. Additional federal dollarscame from the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 that provided $200 million toeliminate the most dangerous crossings (Kuennen 2001a:21). With these funds, the SRC made aninventory of all the railroad crossings in the state and formulated hazard ratings for eachcrossing.By 1938, Maryland completed work on 70 grade elimination projects, but still had 150 gradecrossings in the state highway system outside of incorporated towns and cities. The only form ofprotection on nearly all these crossings was a warning sign. The SRC looked at accident reportsinvolving grade crossings around the state. They found 27 people killed and another 70 peopleinjured over a five-year period. The Commission concluded that the construction of an expensiveoverpass or underpass was not necessary at every grade crossing. Instead, changes to the road orthe installation of flashing lights or a warning signal, known as a ―wig-wag,‖ could provide aquicker and better way to utilize scarce funds (State Roads Commission 1938:30-31).In 1938, the SRC reported on the results of a statewide highway planning study showing thatMaryland contained a total of 18,137.6 miles of roadway, of which 4,057 miles or, about 21percent, was under the direct control of the SRC. Traffic volume on state highways ranged froma high of more than 20,000 vehicles a day along US 1 between Baltimore and Washington, toless than ten vehicles a day on a road in Charles County. An increasing proportion of thesevehicles were trucks (State Roads Commission 1938:17).At the national level, Congress requested the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) in 1938 to study thefeasibility of a system of high-speed national highways. The BPR worked with state highwaydepartments to develop planning surveys following passage of the Hayden-Cartwright Act in1934 that allowed 1.5% of federal highway funds to be used for ―surveys, plans, and engineeringinvestigation of projects for future construction.‖ The effort also led states to undertake massiveneeds studies to project future population trends, traffic volumes, and vehicle ownership trends(McDonald 2003).The resulting data provided the foundation for the BPR‘s 1939 report Toll Roads and FreeRoads, a master plan for a 26,700-mile interstate highway system. President Roosevelt appointedthe National Interregional Highway Committee to study the plan in 1941. Congress backed theCommittee‘s expanded version of the plan and the BPR issued a revised master plan,Interregional Highways in 1944 that urged state highway departments to begin planning for a40,000-mile network of express roads so work could begin as soon as the war ended (Seely2000).In 1940, the SRC published its twenty-year plan for meeting Maryland‘s future highway needs.Entitled Maryland’s Highway Needs 1941-1960: A Report of the State-wide Highway PlanningSurvey, the plan envisioned a long-range construction program based on the premise that theSRC would control all aspects of planning, financing, constructing, improving, and maintainingthe state‘s highway system with local city streets and county roads remaining under municipal orcounty control. One of the benefits of planning two decades in advance was that it made theacquisition of right-of-ways less costly. Backed up with effective zoning laws, the SRC hoped to\15-SEP-11\\ 4-4