The Highway Team 
  
Today, it would be unusual and unexpected to find an individual with suf- 
ficent overall experience, or the time or the physical energy, to consider fully, 
in the processes of highway location, the mounting complex and interrelated prob- 
lems arising from the increases in number, weight, and speed of motor vehicles, 
the changes and intensifications in land use, and the necessities of properly 
fitting the highway to the topography, bordering land use, and connecting 
transportation facilities. This means that no longer can locations be effec- 
tively made by the lone "locator." Specialization has become a necessity. A 
team of qualified specialists now work together on the problems. Among mem- 
bers of the highway team are officials, administrators, and planners; traffic 
engineers; location engineers; ground surveyors; soils, materials, and drain- 
age engineers; design engineers; landscape architects; bridge and other struc- 
tural engineers; right-of-way engineers, appraisers, and negotiators; and con- 
struction and maintenance engineers. With each member of the team knowing the 
objectives, realizing wherein his particular work fits, and understanding the 
significance of the work of others, team success is seemingly assured. 
Qualifications, good intentions, and cooperation, however, are not enough. 
Regardless of the competence of each of the preceding specialists, whether they 
work together or whether each one works separately and progressively upon the 
contributions of others in the sequential stages of highway location and design, 
none of them can work without ample and appropriately detailed qualitative 
information and quantitative data of adequate accuracy and scope. Modern aerial 
surveys, fully utilized, have become the major competent and economic means by 
which such specialists may now obtain the information and data they need, when 
and where required. The actual or imaginary barriers to acquiring sufficient 
and applicable facts are now eliminated. With these facts at hand and any sub- 
sequently needed being readily obtainable for solution of specific problems, 
deficiencies and undesirable consequences can be greatly reduced, if not 
entirely eliminated. Effectiveness and success in the teamwork are assured. 
The retarding influences in acceptance, in improvement, and finally, in 
full utilization of aerial surveys by highway engineers have been their initial 
lack of understanding of the benefits that will accrue to them and their slow- 
ness in acquiring sufficient knowledge and ability to utilize aerial surveys. 
Now that. the highway team is cognizant of these benefits, each member must 
become thoroughly versed in basic principles of aerial surveys applicable to 
his specialty and acquire the understanding and ability necessary to apply them. 
In the future it will be as important for engineers and other specialists on 
the highway team to know how they can use aerial surveys as to know all other 
aspects of their work. 
Survey parties directed by the one-man locator are now substantially dis- 
placed by the aerial photography crew, photographic interpreters, the photo- 
grammetric engineers and their assistants, and surveyors of ground control. 
Each of these specialists, now a member of the highway team, should become 
appropriately informed concerning highway engineering so as to be more fully 
qualified to apply himself in that field. 
Aspects and Arrangement 
  
Aerial surveys are used extensively in preliminary engineering, the series 
of coordinated stages in which the creative work is professionally accomplished, 
proceeding from the general to the specific and ending when construction plans 
are completed and the highway location is staked on the ground. Before highway 
location and design are undertaken by these methods, traffic generation factors 
and the places or areas in which they exist, or will likely exist, must be 
ascertained or forecasted according to their size, relationship, and proximity 
to each other, and to their traffic generation potential by numbers and types 
of vehicles. Wherever emphasis is to be on service for traffic, each highway