OCR Text |
Show Highway Department Discloses Nearly 35,000 Miles of Roads, By systems, 13 per cent, or 444,000 miles in the United States are on the primary system, sys-tem, with an additional 265,000 miles on state systems. Another 2.7 million miles, or 77 per cent of the total in the country, are under local control; and 112,000 miles, or 3 per cent, are in National Parks, National Forests and Indian reservations. The total mileage of the road and street system in Utah has grown only gradually in recent years. The needs of the state lie generally not in more mileage Some interesting figures on the total mileage and types of surfaces of highways, roads and streets, both in the United States and in Utah, were released to-. to-. day. C. Taylor Burton, Director of Utah State Department of Highways, reported that there are now over 3.5 million miles of roads and streets in the nation and 34,531 miles in the state. Mr. Burton pointed out that 88 per cent (3.1 million miles) of the national total are rural roads, and 12 per cent (430,000 miles) are municipal streets. In Utah rural roads also com- but m improvement or replacement replace-ment of existing highways. "Although "Al-though some mileage is added every year to the state's road system," sys-tem," Director Burton states, "the main effort of the State Highway Department in the recent re-cent past has been to modernize and to incorporate safety-design into our highways." prise 88 per cent of the total (30,409 miles). Of these, 7,650 miles are under federal control; 5,005 miles under state control; 1 and 17,754 under municipal control. con-trol. Utah's city streets total 3,913 miles or 11 per cent of the state's total, of which 621 miles are under state control and 3,292 are under municipal jurisdiction. The federal government has jurisdiction only of roads in national na-tional forests, national parks, Indian In-dian reservations, etc. The federal-aid system, on which federal funds are used for highway construction con-struction through co-operative federal-state programs, are parts of the road systems under the jurisdiction of the state and local governments. All maintenance costs of federal-aid roads, after they are built, must be borne solely by the state without federal fed-eral participation. Nearly one. million miles, or 28 per cent of the 3.5 million miles of roads and streets in the United States, are unsurfaced. Of the "surfaced" roads, 1.3 million miles, or 37 per cent of the total are soil-surfaced or have surfaces of gravel, crushed stone, or slag. If not well-maintained, some of these lower types of surfacing may appear to the public to be gravel roads, Mr. Burton pointed out. Over 1.2 million miles, which is 35 per cent of the total have surfaces ranging from bituminous bitumi-nous surface treatment or bituminous bitu-minous and portland cement con- In Utah, about half, or 15,236 miles of the rural roads, and less than 5 per cent of the city streets (only 178 miles) are unsurfaced. un-surfaced. Of the "paved" roads, there are 15,382 miles of rural roads in Utah and 3,735 miles of city streets. More than half, or 8,759 miles of the state's rural roads classified above as "surfaced," are either soil-surfaced, slag, gravel or stone. The other half have surfaces ranging from bituminous bi-tuminous surface treatment to bituminous and portland-cement concrete. Of the city streets classified clas-sified above as "surfaced" about a third, or 1,255 miles are soil-surfaced, soil-surfaced, slag, gravel or stone; while the other two-thirds range from bituminous treatment to bituminous and portland-cement concrete surface. |