Public Roads: 80 Years Old, But the Best Is Yet to Come

In the very first issue of Public Roads in May 1918, Logan Waller Page, director of the Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering in the Department of Agriculture, explained the purpose and goals of the magazine. These have remained essentially the same for 80 years.

Page wrote, "It will be our earnest effort - always with the support and cooperation of the highway organizations of the States - to present matters of special interest to those directly concerned with the construction and maintenance of roads, to bring to all the progress of road improvement throughout the country, [and] to discuss its problems and record its results. Always with the single purpose and devout hope that from this closer association will be born a determined and united disposition to bring to road betterment that which is best in and for this generation, that which, in this period in our history, will make for the greatest strength of our Nation."

Being involved with the cutting edge of new technology and new developments is old business for Public Roads. Public Roads was the original publisher of many landmark papers in highway research. A paper published in the May 1929 issue, "Interrelationship of Load, Road and Subgrade" by C. Hogentogler and C. Terzaghi, "laid the foundations of subgrade soil classification and marked a turning point in studies of subgrade soils."1 During the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, highway researchers were constantly making new discoveries and inventing new instruments to measure what had never been measured before. Information about many of these new instruments - for example, the Goldbeck Pressure Cell for measuring pressures under pavement, the electric eye and road tube traffic counters, the Benkelman Beam for measuring minute deflections in pavements under load - "first reached the scientific world through the pages of Public Roads."

The following account of the history of Public Roads is taken from America's Highways 1776-1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program:

[Public Roads] provided the State highway officials with a welcome forum for the discussion of current problems. The first issue brought the industry up-to-date by summarizing motor vehicle licensing laws and fees for registration and operators' licenses. This wartime issue also urged highway builders to conserve scarce fuel by proper attention to the firing of boilers and the careful use of steam in road machines and in quarrying. An entire issue (June 1918) was devoted to the catastrophic road breakups caused by heavy trucking during the 1918 spring thaw. The May 1919 issue dealt with the social and economic benefits of using convict labor on the Public Roads. When the Government distributed the huge surpluses of military equipment to the States, Public Roads ran articles on how to take care of the equipment and convert it to civilian highway use.

Public Roads published the resolutions adopted by the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) at its annual meetings of December 1918, 1919, and 1920, and also the papers read at those conventions. In effect, its was the official journal of AASHO until that organization launched its own publication, American Highways, in 1922.

Within a year of its first issue, Public Roads was an important voice of the young highway industry, with a long waiting list of would-be-subscribers. In fiscal year 1920, the authorized monthly circulation was raised to 4,500 copies, but hundreds of requests for the magazine had to be refused. Budgetary cuts reduced the circulation to 4,000 copies per month for fiscal year 1921, and, without explanation, publication was suspended altogether after the December 1921 issue. The suspension drew an immediate protest from the American Road Builders' Association, AASHO, and other organizations interested in roads and also "many expressions of regret not only from its engineer subscribers, but also from the non-technical administrative heads of county highway activities to whom it had been helpful. Not the least gratifying of such expressions were those which came entirely without solicitation from the editors of other technical engineering journals."² Public Roads resumed publication in March 1924, with the return of better times. However, the magazine was no longer a forum for the administrative and technical problems of the States, this function having been assumed by American Highways after Public Roads ceased publication. Instead, the new Public Roads was exclusively a house research journal.

Publication has continued without interruption from March 1924 down to the present, although the frequency of issues has varied widely. Through the years, Public Roads again expanded to include articles on highway research and development from sources outside of the Bureau of Public Roads. Throughout its long history, Public Roads has maintained a high standard of scientific accuracy and literary clarity and, taken as a whole, is a remarkable chronology of the development of highway engineering and economics in the motor age.

Read Additional Salutations from...
Department of Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater	Federal Highway Administrator Kenneth R. Wykle	Federal Highway Administrator, 1989-1993 Dr. Thomas D. Larson
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