School Bus Transportation News at STN Media

The Organic Relationship of Highways to School Buses

Fifty years ago this month a seminal event in the history of pupil transportation occurred. While our industry usually cites the first School Bus National Minimum Standards Conference organized in 1939 by Dr. Frank Cyr as THE historic event which gave rise to the school bus system we know it today, let’s not forget one other significant development that by now is engrained in the warp and woof of the American psyche.

One June 29, 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation establishing the National Interstate Highway System.

This modern network of more than 46,000 miles of superhighway linked east and west, north and south, and small town America and urban centers alike. But it has done much more. The standards and guidelines for road design and construction President Eisenhower set in motion five decades ago are now ingrained in the nation’s highway safety policies. Moreover, through the mechanism of the federal motor vehicle safety standards, highway design criteria are engineered in the construction and operational practices of the modern school bus system. The development of a standardized road system contributed to the evolution of the modern school bus in different — though complimentary — ways to the school bus construction standards set in motion by Dr. Cyr nearly eight decades ago.

Coincidently, with the Minimum Standards Conference in 1939, the first description of an interstate highway system appeared that year in a report to Congress titled “Toll Roads and Free Roads.” However, our modern highway system owes much to an arduous nationwide trek in 1919 on the old Lincoln Highway. In that year Eisenhower, then a young army Lieutenant Colonel, participated in a transcontinental convoy from Washington, DC to San Francisco. The two-month journey was undertaken in the aftermath of World War I to assess the readiness of military vehicles to make such long trips.

Ike remembered that journey more than two decades later when he led Allied armies into Nazi Germany, there traveling on a network of rural superhighways. The divided, four-lane autobahns were already the envy of U.S. highway engineers who traveled to Germany during the pre-war 1930s. “The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land,” said Ike after he became president.

Ike is widely considered to have originated the Interstate System primarily as a defense network. Turns out this belief is a myth, one of many that surround the highway system.

Congress initially authorized the program for up to 40,000 miles in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944. When he was president a decade later, Ike supported the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, giving legs to the program with $10 billion in funding. Moreover, America was in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and to garner public support for the bill the phrase “and Defense” was added to the title of the legislation. In actuality, it was not a defense bill at all.

Indeed, it wasn’t until the ISTEA highway legislation of 1990 that the official name of the Interstate System was changed to the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

While Ike fully understood the military value of the system, his support was largely based on perceived civilian benefits — better mobility, economic development, congestion relief, etc.

Ike’s vision also encompassed highway safety and reduction of motor vehicle accidents, for which many Americans owe him thanks. The U.S. Department of Transportation cites one estimate that the Interstate System saved approximately 187,000 lives and avoided nearly 12 million injuries during the first 40 years of its existence. “In addition, the safety lessons learned from Inter-state design contributed to a decline in traffic fatalities on all roads even as traffic volumes more than doubled …,” according to DOT.

For school bus safety, probably the most influential changes the national system imposed were better roadway design standards.

Prior to the advent of the Interstate System, for example, traffic lanes were typically 9- to 10-feet wide. Driveways in and out of farms and personal residences often connected directly to the passing street, even if it was the main thoroughfare. Uniform height limit for overpasses did not exist. Trees, utility poles and other objects were left adjacent to the road, leading to often deadly results as motorists lost control of their car. Passing slower cars on two- or three-lane roads — some of us remember the “chicki lane” — led to numerous crashes, too. Imagine the carnage of an annual School Bus Loading & Unloading Zone Report under these highway conditions!

The federal government first addressed these hazardous conditions in 1944 when a new set of design guidelines for highways and streets was developed. When Congress funded the Interstate System in 1956 widespread implementation of these engineering standards began in earnest. It was in the environment of consistent roadways that school bus builders engineered what we now know as the modern school bus.

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Interstate System, a 20-bus convoy of motor coaches departed on June 15 from the same terminus in San Francisco that Lt. Col. Eisenhower departed from in 1919 and arrived at the Zero Milestone marker in Washington, DC on June 29th. More information about this slice of American history is available at the DOT’s 50th Anniversary Web site.