Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 1, Number 16, DeMotte, Jasper County, 10 November 1932 — EDITORIAL [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

EDITORIAL

FUNDAMENTALS OF ROAD BUILDING In a recent magazine article, Bernard E. Gray, Highway Engineer of the Asphalt Institute, emphasized the following fundamentals of road building: 1. The attitude of the engineer toward types of surfacing should be to use the lowest cost type adequate for climatic and present traffic conditions 2. Every proper engineerng principle, such as adequate drainage, careful grading and rigid inspection should be applied to low-cost surfac es as well as expensive ones, so that, as traffic grows, all finished work will serve as a foundation for additional improvements. 3. With some types of surface, maintenance costs increase with time. With others--particularly low-cost surfaces--the reverse is true. Maintenance work is cumulative and decreases as the years pass. This is an important factor in any sound road program. 4. Too many communities have built “costly monuments to pride”--roads costing infinitely more than is justified by the traffic--when a common sense attitude would have given them three times the useful mileage for the same money. 5. The engineer or highway official who best serves his community is the one who first studies local traffic and materials and then adapts a low-cost surfacing plan that really meets local needs These five statements are worth remembering. Every road is an individual problem and must be treated as such. Even so, certain generalizations hold good, one of them being that first-class weatherproof roads, suitable for a fairly heavy volume of traffic, can be built for a very few thousand dollars a mile by using bases of locally-produced materials with a bituminous surface. A multitude of counties, states and municipalities have given their citizens long wearing, serviceable roads and streets without inflating the tax bill.