For Release Saturday, January 16, 2009
Citiwire.net
Well if you ever plan to motor west,
Just take my way, that’s the highway that’s the best.
Get your kicks on Route sixty-six.
Well it winds from Chicago to LA
More than two-thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on Route sixty-six….
Well it goes through St. Louie down to Missouri
Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty.
You’ll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Winona,
Kingsman, Barstow, San Bernardino.
Won’t you get hip to this timely tip
And think you’ll take that California trip.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.
– (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66, By Bobby Troup, 1946.
Bobby Troup’s bouncy 1946 tune about the joys of Route 66 has its roots in a series of federal transportation bills after World War I and the resulting scramble by state boosters and budding state transportation departments to get a piece of the action.
In this, it resembles today’s efforts to create a high or higher speed rail system. Law and policy making can be both dull and messy, but if done right, can produce dreams and songs. States and regions are vying for a share of the new railroad money. Their competition for dollars is not pretty. But if Route 66 is any example, it may produce something worthwhile.
Troup said he was inspired to write his famous song while literally driving Route 66. At that time, in post-war America, driving cross-country in one’s personal automobile was still a novel and amazing thing. Route 66 had been cobbled together by linking some existing roads, and many of them still just dirt, until the make-work, depression relief, WPA project under President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 completed its paving. Those final drops of asphalt completed a vision that had taken two decades of policy-making and spending to achieve. This was the dream of true inter-city highways, a dream that then seemed as distant around World War I as 200-mph trains do today.
It took a few attempts to get it right. In the Federal-Aid Road Act of 1916, Congress approved $75 million for highways–then a whole lot of money–to go for roads outside and between cities. But states, which were in charge of distributing the money, tended to spread the money to every county, which meant the benefits were felt everywhere and nowhere.
To counteract this tendency, Congress required, in the successor Federal-Aid Road Act of 1921, that 60 percent of the money be used for inter-city travel and on a limited number of roads. This helped create Route 66, which was not really a new highway, just a cobbling together of existing dirt or roughly paved roads through common signage, along with a commitment to improve them.
Predictably, arguments about the location of routes ensued. Just like today with high speed rail, states and regions recognize that being on a route is ticket to prosperity. But even route numbers were in contention, as regions vied to be designated one of the numbers divisible by ten. Route 60 was thought to be particularly attractive.
Things were at loggerheads, until Oklahoma promoter Cyrus Avery, who was on the numbering board appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture, decided Route 66, with its alliteration, would be even better than Route 60. (The Bureau of Public Roads, back then, was just a division of Agriculture on the theory that good roads were mostly there to get farmers to market; only later did it mutate into today’s mammoth federal Transportation Department).
Avery in 1925 sent a telegram to the Bureau of Public Roads chief, Thomas MacDonald, saying “We prefer sixty-six.” And the fight ended. Cyrus had had the insight that the alliterative “Sixty-Six” was catchier than say “Route 60″ or “Route 70.” And it seems Cyrus was right. Singing “Get Your Kicks On Route Sixty” just doesn’t compete.
Flash forward three quarters of a century. Todays’ state and regional boosters are haggling for some of the billions that Congress has awarded for higher speed rail, just as boosters and backers haggled for road money back in the 1920s. This is messy, but also to be expected. It’s unwise to think that the selection of routes and spending of money can be done on some sort of pure technocratic basis. Who wants it more is a valid criterion–though it should be just one–for awarding funds.
How much money is out there? It’s getting difficult to add it all up. President Obama got Congress to award, in last winter’s Recovery Act, an initial $8 billion for high-speed rail projects. He requested another $5 billion in the 2010 budget. Congress recently awarded another $2.5 billion for high-speed train travel. These numbers may sound big, but actually they are a pittance compared to say China, which by some estimates is putting $750 billion into building a high-speed rail system between its major cities.
Still, Congress new openness to trains opens the rails to the most significant new investment in train travel in several generations. And states and cities are vying for the funding. So far, the Federal Railroad Administration has received more than 250 applications, totalling more than $50 billion, for high-speed rail projects.
How should these funds be awarded and where? A recent report by America 2050, a research and planning group, has ranked corridors around the country in their receptivity and potential to high-speed rail, the first comparison of that type ever made.
But let’s focus too on the top lesson from yesteryear: not to fritter away the big cash of the moment by giving a pittance to everyone. Spend the money on a few places, where it can demonstrably and dramatically improve train travel, making it higher speed if not true European style high speed travel. Only then can we jump-start our dreams, as well as a few projects.
Alex Marshall’s e-mail address is alexmarshall@alexmarshall.org.
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