In March 1916, James Allen (1871-1934) becomes the sixth Highway Commissioner for Washington state. Allen is credited with planning the state's primary highway system, and for many road safety innovations, including compensating elevations at road curves, and the idea of building highways as straight as possible for safer high-speed travel. Many of the Allen's innovations served as a template for many other states in this formative period of road building.
The position of Highway Commissioner was created in March 1905, when the State Legislature created the post along with a Highway Board to oversee road building in Washington State.
James Allen was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on January 24, 1871. Washington Governor Ernest Lister (1870-1919) had appointed him State Highway Engineer before appointing him to the commissioner post. During his nine years as department head, Allen's title changed three times: from Highway Commissioner to Supervisor of Highways (when Governor Louis F. Hart [1862-1929] replaced the state Highway Board with the State Highway Committee and made the Highway Department a division of the Department of Public Works in February 1921), to State Highway Engineer, when the Legislature separated the Division of Highways from the Department of Public Works in 1923.
Four months after Allen became Commissioner, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act -- the first federal assistance for state highway costs. That May the Highway Department stopped using convict labor for road building.
Innovations and New Systems
In 1921, during Allen's tenure as chief of the Highway Department, the Legislature enacted the first gas tax for road construction and maintenance, shifting the tax burden from property owner to road user. Driver's licenses were made mandatory that same session, and in 1925, the Legislature authorized the department to cooperate with other states to adopt uniform safety devices and signs, and uniform numbering of interstate roads.
Allen's advocacy of building roads and highways as straight as possible for speed and safety was a trend away from the many winding, scenic highways built before his watch. He established the use of compensating elevations, called "superelevated curves," which offset vehicle momentum on curving roadways. He was the first to advocate the 20-foot-wide highway, which became the state standard.
He also innovated the road-engineering practice of putting a heavier surface on the outer edges of the road. This engineering feature was prevalent on roads throughout the nation by the time of his death in 1934.
Allen left the Highway Department in March 1925 and was succeeded by J. W. Hoover. After undergoing treatment for a tumor of the throat, James Allen died on April 20, 1934, at age 63.
Loyal to the Public Interest
After his death, the Seattle Municipal News wrote on an address he had presented to the Municipal League on the subject of the State Highway System:
"Characteristic of him was his reference to the original and then novel features of our highway planning and construction as if they were part of the established and ordinary method and practice of good hard-surface road building. There was no intimation that he or his staff had originated them. His make-up was such that he was absolutely and inevitably loyal to the public interest and just to all men, and great in that quality of the American Pioneer -- the solving of new problems by the exercise of a high intelligence and common sense."
