History
The South Carolina Department of Transportation is still familiarly known as the Highway Department, which is what the agency was called until May 13, 1977 when an act of the South Carolina General Assembly reformed the agency as the Department of Highways and Public Transportation (SCDHPT).
The current name, the Department of Transportation, was established in the State Government Restructuring Act of 1993. This act split functions of the SCDHPT to establish the SCDOT and the Department of Public Safety.
The roots of the state agency trace back to the establishment of a five member highway commission in 1917. Prior to 1917, county governments were entirely responsible for building and maintaining roads. The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 and the promise of federal money to build highways served as the impetus for the creation of the commission. However, the commission lacked "the authority to designate roads to be improved with federal funds and the power to supervise directly the work being done."
Read more about this topic: South Carolina Department Of Transportation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)