Annual Travel on County Highways of Indiana

One of the important items of highway information has been, and probably will always be, who should pay how much of the cost of building and maintaining roads and streets. Of similar importance is the question where should we spend the money collected in taxes for highways. Each year the highway officials at every government level have more roads which need to be rebuilt or maintained than available funds will permit. At every meeting of the state legislature, the needs of the state, the counties and cities for more road funds is eloquently and clearly stated. In the absence of substantial increases in such funds comes attempts to change the distribution formula by which current funds are divided among the state, the counties and the cities. In recent years such at­ tempts have been a biennial recurrence. The state with over 11,000 miles of highway, including most of the high volume roads and streets in the state, can ably establish the need for more money to reconstruct its many inadequate roads and bridges. The case for cities, with about the same mileage of streets and ever increasing populations and traffic growth, is well known to the average motorist and the need for more funds is easily established. The counties, with 68,000 miles of road— six times as much as the state or the cities in Indiana, have thousands of miles of low quality roads and hundreds of narrow bridges and too can present well the need for more funds. One measure often used to determine the distribution of highway funds is that of vehicle miles. In 1965, the total vehicle miles traveled on all Indiana roads and streets was estimated to be about 25 billion. Of course, vehicle mileage is expected to increase—perhaps in a simi­