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a "shoulder" of gravel 58 feet wide. These tremendous shoulders, roads in themselves, will be provided for the use of slow moving vehicles and for parking purposes. Thus 78 feet of width will be provided for travel in each direction.
Building for the Future
The Ideal Section of the Lincoln Highway was designed to handle a daily traffic of 30,000 vehicles, estimated to consist of approximately 15,000 passenger cars and 5,000 trucks. On this basis the new Detroit-Pentia.c road will, when completed, be capable of carrying in the neighborhood of 40,000 vehicles a day. While it is unlikely that such a traffic will be reached in the near future it will ultimately develop according to those who have the plans in hand. The roadway is used extensively for driveaways from the Detroit automobile factories and also from the plants in Flint and Pontiac.
In 1930 the engineers who designed the Ideal Section of the Lincoln Highway assumed that its specifications would be adequate to take care of any development of traffic on any .one road for a period of 30 years. Four years later we find a read twice as adequate being constructed between two points where only six years ago the completing of a 16 foot concrete pavement was looked upon as an achievement which it was predicted would provide for a generation at least without further improvement.
Six years have served to make the pavement then provided less adequate for the traffic demand since developed than the dirt road which it succeeded. How can our public road officials err on the side of too generous improvement?