Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

There are no access restrictions.

Use Restrictions

There are no restrictions on personal use. Permission to publish material from the James J. McDonnell transportation collection must be obtained from Special Collections Research Center, George Mason University Libraries.

Preferred Citation

James J. McDonnell transportation collection, C0104, Special Collections and Archives, George Mason University Libraries.

Acquisition Information

Collection donated by Laurie McDonnell through John Gifford in February 1996.

Processing Information

Processed by Special Collections and Archives staff. Additional processing by Eron Ackerman in 2010. EAD markup completed by Eron Ackerman and Jordan Patty in August 2009. Additional EAD markup by Eron Ackerman in 2010.

Biographical Information

Born in 1930, James McDonnell worked as a civil engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s, then built an extensive career as a highway engineer for the Bureau of Public Roads (which would become the Federal Highway Administration). During his 33-year career with U.S. government transportation agencies, McDonnell was recognized as a national expert in transportation data collection and use. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he directed the Shirley Highway corridor study in Northern Virginia. His study led to the widening of the four-lane, World War II-era freeway into the first freeway with reversible high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes in the median. In 1964, McDonnell was called back to Washington to fill a key vacancy as Chief of BPR's Planning Procedure Branch. During his 20-year tenure in this position, he became nationally recognized for his many accomplishments, one of which was the development of a new Home Interview Survey Manual, that brought the practice of conducting surveys, and analyzing results into the computer age. He died in 1995.

Scope and Content

The McDonnell collection contains materials related to McDonnell's work on the Shirley Highway project and other materials from his work at the US Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Types of materials include correspondence, reports, government publications, black-and-white photographs, and 35mm black-and-white negatives.

Series 1: Printed Materials contains studies, reports, correspondence, and conference proceedings on highway and urban transportation planning mostly in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Included are statistical studies of the Public Roads Administration from the 1940s, reports on a Pentagon area transportation study from 1960-61, several Fairfax, Virginia household surveys from 1986, and McDonnell's 1958 Master's thesis, "Characteristics of Traffic on a 3 Lane One-Way Roadway Entering a 2 Lane Constriction."

Series 2: Photographs contains photographs, negatives, and presentation slides of various junctures on the northbound and southbound routes of Shirley Memorial Highway. Some of the pohotgraphs show heavy traffic on Shirley Highway and the bridge leading to US 1.

Series 3: Oversize contains oversized printed materials including transportation studies and reports. Some of the reports include maps of roadways in the National Capital Region and charts and graphs of traffic patterns.

Arrangement

This collection is divided into three series according to media format. Each series is arranged by subject.

Series 1: Printed Materials, 1939-1995 (Boxes 1-5) Series 2: Photographs, 1949-1960 (Boxes 6-7) Series 3: Oversize, 1959-1967 (Boxes 8-9)

Related Material

Special Collections and Archives also holds many other transportation collections.

Index Terms

Corporate Names:

• United States. Bureau of Public Roads.
• United States. Federal Highway Administration.

Geographical Names:

• Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway (Va.)--Photographs.

Subjects:

• Highway engineering--United States.
• Transportation--United States--Planning.

Document Types:

• Negatives.
• Photographic prints.

Adjunct Descriptive Data