Secondary Roads Are Important Too

There is an old fable about a stag that was very proud of his antlers. He used to stand at the edge of a pool and look down in the water to admire his image. As he indulged in admiration of their reflected glory, he was repeatedly distraught as his gaze also took in the reflection of his forelegs, which he considered spindly and ugly. One day, a mountain lion crept to the water’s edge and the stag bounded away. His escape would have been perfect, too, if his antlers had not become entangled in a thicket. As he pawed feverishly, not knowing whether he could disentangle himself before the lion caught him he thought: “Alas! how foolish I have been! I have been ashamed of my legs and have considered them unimportant. Now I perceive that a stag’s life depends upon them.” Highway engineers often indulge in recitation of figures showing the high proportion of the vehicle miles of rural traffic carried by a small percentage of the total rural mileage. In explanation of the importance of main rural roads, it is said that one percent of all rural roads carries 20 per cent of the rural traffic. It is said that the state primary highway systems, comprising 11 percent of the total rural mileage, carry about two-thirds of all rural traffic. These relationships are true. It is also true that the stag’s crowning glory was his antlers, which well deserved admiration. But the stag made the mistake of attaching importance to his antlers and to his legs on the basis of the single item of appearance. We must not make the mistake of attaching importance to our various systems or classes of roads on the basis of the single item of vehicle miles carried. W hat are secondary roads anyway? There is a Federal-aid Pri­ mary System and a Federal-Aid Secondary System which, together, in­ clude about one-fifth of the three million miles of rural roads in the United States. These federal-aid systems embrace most of the state primary systems and state secondary systems, which, together, include