A linear upper bound on the rectilinear crossing number
  It is proved that the rectilinear crossing number of every graph with bounded tree-width and bounded degree is linear in the number of vertices.   **** This paper has been withdrawn by the author. ****   The results have been superseeded by the author's paper with Jan Arne Telle: "Planar decompositions and the crossing number of graphs with an excluded minor", http://arxiv.org/math/0604467. 
David R. Wood