208 CONFERENCE ON NATURAL BEAUTY 



Simply stated, we should build into our highway planning a process 

 where design is required, indeed where it leads the whole effort. It 

 is not enough to invite design consultants or to have partial funds 

 for design or planning. That has not worked up to this point. 



We have already developed the technical knowledge to design 

 the rural highway. We have been doing it for a half century or 

 more. 



Since our urban areas will double in size within the next 35 years, 

 the real frontier of environmental design today is the city and the 

 key to its design is to understand how highways affect the city. Here 

 we Americans ought to be making a large investment in exploratory 

 design as we have done with radios, TV sets, jet airplanes, and 

 rockets to the moon. 



ROBERT L. PERKINS, Jr. Highways directly destroy natural beauty 

 in two ways: first by their location, second by the way they 

 are constructed. The first is fairly obvious. As to the second, 

 design and construction methods may bring about results such as 

 large-scale pollution by silt or the ravaging of nearby lands for the 

 purpose of obtaining or disposing of fill. 



There is an urgent need to provide some real balance in the process 

 of route selection and design between the economic and engineering 

 factors, and the other resource values, both tangible and intangible. 

 A procedure should be established to give appropriate and unbiased 

 consideration to all resource values involved and to use this as a basis 

 for decisions. At present, little or no consideration is given to the 

 destruction of natural, scenic, and historic areas and, in fact, such 

 lands are likely to act as a magnet in drawing highways. 



The more successful the protectors of such areas have been the 

 more likely it is that a highway planner will select those areas as the 

 cheapest route. The facts that a highway may destroy such a tract's 

 usefulness, for the public purpose for which it was set aside, and that 

 the nearest thing to a replacement for that public purpose costs an 

 enormous amount may not be a deterrent. Highway planners in 

 most cases are not required to be concerned with replacement value 

 but only with the highway's effect on the market value of the land's 

 so-called highest and best use, as determined by condemnation com- 

 missioners which use is usually for housing or for industry, and may 

 not be greatly reduced by the proposed highway even if the natural 

 values are largely destroyed. 



