Generally, the trusts coordinated their improvements to provide continuous stretches of good road, but if they were offering alternative routes to the same place, they sometimes competed with each other, trying to attract traffic and therefore tolls to travel their route. The first Turnpike Acts were passed in the late 17th century and by the mids, about 22, miles of road in England and Wales — about one fifth of the road network — were managed by turnpike trusts.
Trusts could either appoint collectors, who would have to sign an oath to confirm they had handed all the tolls over, or they could let the tolls. An advert in The Times for April stated the date and place when the trustees of the New Cross Turnpike Roads intended to auction the tolls, giving the sum collected in a previous period as guide price to bidders. Toll houses were built next to the turnpikes as someone needed to be collecting the tolls 24 hours a day. These represented a significant investment from the trusts.
The standard toll house design adopted in the s was of a small, single-story cottage with a polygonal bay front. Some toll houses on major roads were built on a rather grander design, with castellated rooves, designed to impress rich travellers and tempt them to use their route over an alternative.
Turnpikes were generally placed outside the town so that local businesses did not have to pay the toll. However, the remoteness of their locations meant that the toll houses were vulnerable to theft and as a precaution, they tended to be fitted with bars and a safe. Many toll houses were demolished when the turnpike trusts were abolished particularly if their position restricted the width of the road.
Others were sold into private ownership. The toll rates for each turnpike were set according to the Turnpike Act that established it and differed according to the type of user. The Mail did not have to pay tolls. An outrider blew a horn as the coach approached so that the toll keeper could get the gate open ready without the Mail having to slow down. For every horse, mule, or ass, laden or unladen, and for every chaise, cart, dray, or other carriage drawn by one horse, one penny.
For every coach, chariot, or calash drawn by two or more horses, sixpence. For every cart, dray, or carriage laden with hay, straw, or other goods, twopence.
Turnpike networks became highly organized systems that sought to find the most efficient way of connecting eastern cities with western markets. Decades before the Erie Canal, private individuals realized the natural opening through the Appalachians and planned a system of turnpikes connecting Albany to Syracuse and beyond.
Figure 1 shows the principal routes westward from Albany. Corporate papers of these companies reveal that organizers of different companies talked to each other; they were quite capable of coordinating their intentions and planning mutually beneficial activities by voluntary means.
When the Erie Canal was completed in it roughly followed the alignment of the upper route and greatly reduced travel on the competing turnpikes Baer, Klein, and Majewski Another excellent example of turnpike integration was the Pittsburgh Pike. The Pennsylvania route consisted of a combination of five turnpike companies, each of which built a road segment connecting Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, where travelers could take another series of turnpikes to Philadelphia.
Completed in , the Pittsburgh Pike greatly improved freighting over the rugged Allegheny Mountains. Freight rates between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were cut in half because wagons increased their capacity, speed, and certainty Reiser , Although the state government invested in the companies that formed the Pittsburgh Pike, records of the two companies for which we have complete investment information shows that private interests contributed 62 percent of the capital calculated from Majewski Reiser , Residents in numerous communities contributed to individual projects out of their own self interest.
Their provincialism nevertheless helped create a coherent and integrated system. A comparison of the Pittsburgh Pike and the National Road demonstrated the advantages of turnpike corporations over roads financed directly from government sources. Financed by the federal government, the National Road was built between Cumberland, Maryland, and Wheeling, West Virginia, where it was then extended through the Midwest with the hopes of reaching the Mississippi River.
Besides costing much less, the Pennsylvania Pike was far better in quality. The toll gates along the Pittsburgh Pike provided a steady stream of revenue for repairs. The National Road, on the other hand, depended upon intermittent government outlays for basic maintenance, and the road quickly deteriorated. Historians have found that travelers generally preferred to take the Pittsburgh Pike rather than the National Road.
By the s the major turnpikes were increasingly eclipsed by the often state-subsidized canals and railroads. Many toll roads reverted to free public use and quickly degenerated into miles of dust, mud and wheel-carved ruts. To link to the new and more powerful modes of communication, well-maintained, short-distance highways were still needed, but because governments became overextended in poor investments in canals, taxpayers were increasingly reluctant to fund internal improvements.
Thus the ongoing need for new feeder roads spurred the search for innovation, and plank roads — toll roads surfaced with wooden planks — seemed to fit the need. The plank road technique appears to have been introduced into Canada from Russia in It reached New York a few years later, after the village Salina, near Syracuse, sent civil engineer George Geddes to Toronto to investigate.
Simplicity of design made plank roads even more attractive. They then laid, at right angles, planks that were about eight feet long and three or four inches thick. Builders used no nails or glue to secure the planks — they were secured only by their own weight — but they did build ditches on each side of the road to insure proper drainage Klein and Majewski , No less important than plank road economics and technology were the public policy changes that accompanied plank roads.
Policymakers, perhaps aware that overly restrictive charters had hamstrung the first turnpike movement, were more permissive in the plank road era. Adjusting for deflation, toll rates were higher, toll gates were separated by shorter distances, and fewer local travelers were exempted from payment of tolls. Although few today have heard of them, for a short time it seemed that plank roads might be one of the great innovations of the day.
In just a few years, more than 1, companies built more than 10, miles of plank roads nationwide, including more than 3, miles in New York Klein and Majewski , Majewski, Baer, Klein Except for most of New England, plank roads were chartered throughout the United States, especially in the top lumber-producing states of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states, as shown in Table 4.
Few plank roads were incorporated after In western states, some roads were incorporated and built as plank roads, so the total is not to be taken as a total for the nation. Plank roads were especially popular in rural dairy counties, where farmers needed quick and dependable transportation to urban markets Majewski, Baer and Klein The plank road and eastern turnpike episodes shared several features in common.
Like the earlier turnpikes, investment in plank road companies came from local landowners, farmers, merchants, and professionals. Stock purchases were motivated less by the prospect of earning dividends than by the convenience and increased trade and development that the roads would bring. To many communities, plank roads held the hope of revitalization and the reversal or slowing of relative decline.
But those hoping to attain these benefits once again were faced with a free-rider problem. Investors in plank roads, like the investors of the earlier turnpikes, were motivated often by esteem mechanisms — community allegiance and appreciation, reputational incentives, and their own conscience. Although plank roads were smooth and sturdy, faring better in rain and snow than did dirt and gravel roads, they lasted only four or five years — not the eight to twelve years that promoters had claimed.
Thus, the rush of construction ended suddenly by , and by most companies had either switched to dirt and gravel surfaces or abandoned their road altogether. Unlike the areas served by the earlier turnpikes and plank roads, Colorado, Nevada, and California in the s and s lacked the settled communities and social networks that induced participation in community enterprise and improvement.
Miners and the merchants who served them knew that the mining boom would not continue indefinitely and therefore seldom planted deep roots. Nor were the large farms that later populated California ripe for civic engagement in anywhere near the degree of the small farms of the east. Society in the early years of the West was not one where town meetings, door-to-door solicitations, and newspaper campaigns were likely to rally broad support for a road project.
The lack of strong communities also meant that there would be few opponents to pressure the government for toll exemptions and otherwise hamper toll road operations. These conditions ensured that toll roads would tend to be more profit-oriented than the eastern turnpikes and plank road companies. Still, it is not clear whether on the whole the toll roads of the Far West were profitable.
The California toll road era began in after passage of general laws of incorporation. The laws also delegated regulatory authority to the county governments. After passage of the laws, the number of toll road incorporations increased dramatically, peaking to nearly 40 new incorporations in alone.
Companies were also created by special acts of the legislature. And sometimes they seemed to have operated without formal incorporation at all.
David and Linda Beito , 75, 84 show that in Nevada many entrepreneurs had built and operated toll roads — or other basic infrastructure — before there was a State of Nevada, and some operated for years without any government authority at all. All told, in the Golden State, approximately toll road companies were initiated, 5 resulting in at least companies that successfully built and operated toll roads.
Table 5 provides some rough numbers for toll roads in western states. The numbers presented there are minimums. For California and Nevada, the numbers probably only slightly underestimate the true totals; for the other states the figures are quite sketchy and might significantly underestimate true totals.
Again, an abundance of testimony indicates that the private road companies were the serious road builders, in terms of quantity and quality see the ten quotations at Klein and Yin , Table 6 makes an attempt to justify guesses about total number of toll road companies and total toll road miles. The estimates of success rates and average road length in the third and fourth columns are extrapolations from components that have been studied with more care.
We have made these estimates conservative, in the sense of avoiding any overstatement of the extent of private road building. The numbers in the right hand column have been rounded to the nearest , so as to avoid any impression of accuracy.
Ideally, not only would the numbers be more definite and complete, but there would be a weighting by years of operation. In many toll road companies nationwide continued to operate — probably in the range of to companies. From Maine to California, the laws and political attitudes from around onward moved against the handling of social affairs in ways that seemed informal, inexpert and unsystematic. Progressivism represented a burgeoning of more collectivist ideologies and policy reforms.
Many progressive intellectuals took inspiration from European socialist doctrines. Although the politics of restraining corporate evils had a democratic and populist aspect, the bureaucratic spirit was highly managerial and hierarchical, intending to replicate the efficiency of large corporations in the new professional and scientific administration of government Higgs , , Ekirch , But such demand-side changes do not speak to the issues of road ownership and tolling. Automobiles achieved higher speeds, which made stopping to pay a toll more inconvenient, and that may have reinforced the anti-toll-road company movement that was underway prior to the automobile.
Such developments figured into the history of road policy, but they really did not provide a good reason for the policy movement against the toll roads The following words of a county board of supervisors in New York in indicate a more general ideological bent against toll road companies:.
Given such attitudes, it was no wonder that within the U. The new bureaucracy opposed toll roads, and the Federal Highway Act of barred the use of tolls on highways receiving federal money Seely , 15, Anti-toll-road sentiment became state and national policy.
Investors, of course, cared for long-term economic development, but that does not account for how turnpike organizers overcame the important public goods problem of buying turnpike stock. Esteem, social pressure, and other non-economic motivations influenced local residents to make investments that they knew would be unprofitable at least in a direct sense but would nevertheless help the entire community.
On the other hand, the turnpike companies enjoyed the organizational clarity of stock ownership and residual returns. All companies faced the possibility of pressure from investors, who might have wanted to salvage something of their investment.
Residual claimancy may have enhanced the viability of many projects, including communitarian projects undertaken primarily for use and esteem.
Not-for-profit corporations can appeal to use and esteem but cannot organize themselves to earn residual returns. For-profit corporations organize themselves for residual returns but cannot very well appeal to use and esteem. As already noted, prior to modern tax law and regulation, the old American toll roads were, relative to the British turnpike trusts, more , not less, use-and-esteem oriented by virtue of being structured to pay dividends rather than interest.
Like the eighteenth century British turnpike trusts, the twentieth century American governmental toll projects financed in part by privately purchased bonds generally failed, relative to the nineteenth century American company model, to draw on use and esteem motivations. Source: adapted from D. The first Turnpike Trust was established in Each Trust was responsible for constructing and maintaining a specific road segment, which required capital. Capital was publicly raised, and revenues were generated by charging tolls on users.
This came as a change as road users were accustomed to freely make use of any public roads.
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