June 1942] Agricultural Experiment Station 



III. INADEQUACIES OF RURAL ROAD SYSTEM 



Inadequate road services and unequal road tax burdens arise out 

 of (1) the financial inability of many New Hampshire towns to bear 

 their local road costs; (2) State grant-in-aid formulae which do not 

 sufficiently equalize the 234 towns' road burdens; (3) varying degrees 

 of efficiency in town road administrations and the varying emphases 

 put upon good roads by townspeople ; (4) uneconomic maintenance of 

 local roads in areas barren of agricultural or recreational opportuni- 

 ties; and (5) need for a new State secondary highway system which 

 is projected upon land use as well as "through traffic" needs. 



Not all of the suggested causes of deficient road services and 

 unequal road tax burdens have been thoroughly investigated. This 

 has been due partly to the limiting of the area of investigation by the 

 State Agricultural Planning Committee. For example, the qualifica- 

 tions of the town as an administrative unit for road construction and 

 maintenance have not been examined. The limitations of small 

 governing units as administrative areas have been repeatedly dis- 

 cussed by students of government ; yet they have never disproved the 

 premise that local democratic participation gives governmental agen- 

 cies a vitality for which "centralized efficiency" must be a complement 

 rather than a substitute. 



Because rural people are primarily disturbed by the failure of 

 State aids to equalize sufficiently road taxes and road services among 

 towns, an analysis of State aid formulae is the core of this stud}-. 



A. UNEQUAL TOWN BURDENS IN CONSTRUCTION 

 AND MAINTENANCE OF TOWN (CLASS V) ROADS^" 



COMPARATIVE ABILITY OF TOWNS TO MAINTAIN TOWN ROADS 



The chief criterion for determining a town's ability to bear its 

 road burden is generally agreed to be the town's assessed valuation 

 per mile of maintained road. Such a measure gives weight both to 

 the number of road miles maintained and to the town's taxable wealth. 

 The citizen of a town with a low valuation per mile of town road must 

 usually bear a much heavier road tax burden than his fellow citizen 

 in a town with a high valuation per mile of town road. Moreover, 

 the road services he receives will generally not be so adequate as 

 those provided citizens in towns with larger road maintenance funds 

 resulting from greater wealth per mile of road. 



^ New Hampshire highways are divided by law (P.L. Chap. 83 Sec. 22) into six classes: 



Class I includes all State highways and trunk lines. They are constructed and maintained 

 by the State with a limited amount of Federal aid for construction. 



Class II includes all completed State aided secondary highways which are State maintained 

 and which have not been heretofore and are not hereafter included in Class I. 



Class III includes uncompleted gaps of the trunk line system as authorized by Chapter 87, 

 maintained jointly by State and towns — none in existence at present time. 



Class IV includes all highways within the compact parts of towns of twenty-five hundred 

 inhabitants and over. 



Class V includes all other regularly maintained town roads. 



Class VI includes all other existing public ways not regularly maintained. Towns receive 

 no State support for these roads. 



(See Table 1 for number of miles in each class.) Not included in the above classification 

 are National and State forest highways. 



