The occasion of the almost-centennial of PIARC and the 23rd World Road Congress offers an appropriate time for considering the role of engineers inthe process of highway construction, administration and policy. The Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) in the United States demonstrated that technical leadership in highways could be translated into authority in the policy arena. The paper first examines how this happened, highlighting an attitude of public trust in objective expertise as ideal decision makers and a cooperative administrative style. Underlying both was a deep rooted public enthusiasm and excitement for automobiles. The paper then compares the role ofengineers in highway policy in several European countries, finding parallels that grew in part from the transfer of American approaches to highway and traffic engineering after World War II. Agents of diffusion included the BPR, Yale's Bureau of Street Traffic Research, and the International Road Federation. But this trust in highway engineers was undermined by changing conditions that forced roads to be seen as more than movers of vehicles. By the late 1960s highway engineers were losing authority, while as planners, transportation economists, and other social scientists entered or forced their way into the process of determining highway policy. This paperreviews the shifting roles of highway engineers in the highway policy arena after 1900, emphasizing how expertise granted authority in the realm ofpolicy and administration. The paper initially devotes attention to the American Bureau of Public Roads, but for purposes of comparison it also examines in less detail the place of engineers and experts in developing highway agencies and road policy in European countries. There is a surprising level of consistency among road building bureaucracies, both in terms of the emergence of public support for engineers as apolitical experts and then of the erosion and loss of that public trust in the 1960s and 1970s. Forthe covering abstract see ITRD E139491.
Samenvatting