Toll road
A toll road, turnpike or tollpike is a road on which a toll authority collects a fee for use. Similarly there are toll bridges and toll tunnels. Other non-toll roads are financed using other sources of revenue, most typically gasoline tax or general tax funds. Tolls have been placed on roads at various times in history, often to generate funds for repayment of toll revenue bonds used to finance constructions and/or operation.
Early toll roads
Early references include the (mythical) Greek ferryman Charon charging
a toll to ferry (dead) people across the river Acheron. Aristotle and
Pliny refer to tolls in Arabia and other parts of Asia. In India, before
the 4th century BC the Arthasastra notes the use of tolls. Germanic tribes
charged tolls to travelers across mountain passes. Tolls were used in
the Holy Roman Empire in the 14th century and 15th century.
A good example in the 14th century would be Castle Loevestein in the Netherlands,
which was built at a strategic point where 2 rivers met, and charged tolls
to boats sailing the river.
Toll roads in the United Kingdom
Until the seventeenth century most roads in England, other than surviving
Roman roads, were simple tracks through the earth, the term road indicating
no more than a right of passage. Responsibility for the upkeep of the
roads rested with three groups, the King (the King's Highways), the aristocracy
owning the land over which the roads ran and the monasteries.
The great land-owning monasteries were the most active in road and also
bridge maintenance. The dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII
greatly reduced the quality of the roads.
Parliament passed the upkeep of bridges to local settlements or the containing
county under the 1531 Statute of Bridges and in 1555 the care of roads
was similarly devolved to the parishes as statute labour. Every adult
inhabitant of the parish was obliged to work four consecutive days a year
on the roads, providing their own tools, carts and horses. The work was
overseen by an unpaid local appointee, the Surveyor of Highways. It was
not until 1654 that road rates were introduced. However, the improvements
offered by paid labour were offset by the rise in the use of wheeled vehicles
greatly increasing wear to the road surfaces. The government reaction
to this was to use legislation to limit the use of wheeled vehicles and
also to regulate their construction. A vain hope that wider rims would
be less damaging briefly led to carts with sixteen inch wheels, they did
not cause ruts but neither did they roll and flatten the road as was hoped.
The first turnpike road, whereby travellers paid tolls to be used for
road upkeep, was authorised in 1663 for a section of the Great North Road
in Hertfordshire. The term turnpike refers to a gate on which sharp pikes
would be fixed as a defence against cavalry. Most English gates were not
built to this standard; of the first three gates two were found to be
easily avoided.
The first turnpike trust was established by Parliament through a Turnpike
Act in 1706, placing a section of the London-Coventry-Chester road in
the hands of a group of trustees. The trustees could erect gates as they
saw fit, demand statute labour or a cash equivalent, and appoint surveyors
and collectors, in return they repaired the road and put up mileposts.
Initially trusts were established for limited periods, around twenty years.
The expectation was that the trust would borrow the money to repair the
road and repay that debt over time with the road then reverting to the
local authorities. In reality the initial debt was rarely paid-off and
the trusts were renewed as needed. The turnpike trusts were initially
set up along the thirteen main roads from London, a process that lasted
until 1750. From 1751 until 1772 there was a flurry of interest in turnpike
trusts and a further 390 were established. By 1825 over 1,000 trusts controlled
25,000 miles of road in England and Wales.
The quality of early trust roads was very variable - standards for road
construction were unknown and while they were better the roads still tended
to become easily waterlogged. Road construction improved slowly, initially
through the efforts of individual surveyors, such as John Metcalf in Yorkshire
in the 1760s. But nineteenth century engineers made great advances, notably
Thomas Telford and John Loudon McAdam. The work of Telford on the Holyhead
Road in the 1820s reduced the journey time of the London mail coach from
45 hours to just 27 hours, the best mail coach speeds rose from 5-6 mph
to 9-10 mph. In 1843 the London to Exeter mail coach could complete the
170 miles in 17 hours.
The rise of railway transport largely halted the improving schemes of
the turnpike trusts. The London-Birmingham railway almost instantly halved
the tolls income of the Holyhead Road. Unable to earn sufficient from
tolls alone the trusts took to requiring taxes from the local parishes.
The system was never properly reformed but from the 1870s Parliament stopped
renewing the acts and roads began to revert to local authorities, the
last trust vanished in 1895.
The Local Government Act, 1888 created county councils and gave them responsibility
for maintaining the major roads. The abiding relic of the English toll
roads is the number of houses with names like "Turnpike Cottage",
and occasional roadname: Turnpike Lane in northern London has given its
name to an Underground station.
Today, the only tolls on roads in the United Kingdom are mainly tolled
bridges and tunnels (e.g. Dartford Crossing, Severn crossing, Mersey Tunnels,
Tyne Tunnel), congestion charging schemes, some small, privately-owned
toll roads, (e.g. in Dulwich College), and the recently-built and privately-financed
M6 Toll, potentially the first of a new generation of toll roads.
Toll roads in the United States
A toll road in the United States is often called a turnpike. The term
turnpike may have originated from the turnstile or gate which blocked
passage until the fare was paid at a toll house (or toll booth in current
terminology).
History, funding through tolls
The Matecumbe Keys toll booth on the Overseas Highway in Florida (1938)In
early US history, many individual citizens would gravel nearby stretches
of road and collect a fee from people who used that specific stretch.
Eventually, companies were formed to build, improve, and maintain a particular
section of roadway, and tolls were collected from users to finance the
enterprise. The enterprise was usually named to indicate the locale of
its roadway, often including the name of one or both of the termini. The
word turnpike came into common use in the names of these roadways and
companies, and is essentially used interchangeably with toll road in current
terminology.
The first major toll road in the United States was the Lancaster Turnpike,
built in the 1790s, within Pennsylvania, connecting Philadelphia and Lancaster.
In New York State, the Great Western Turnpike was started in Albany in
1799 and eventually extended, by several alternate routes, to the Finger
Lakes region. Toll roads peaked in the mid 19th century, and by the turn
of the twentieth century most toll roads were taken over by state highway
departments. In some instances, a quasi-governmental authority was formed,
and toll revenue bonds were issued to raise funds for construction and/or
operation of the facility.
With the development, mass production, and popular embrace of the automobile,
faster and higher capacity roads were needed. In the 1920s limited access
highways appeared. Their main characteristics were dual roadways with
access points limited to (but not always) grade-separated interchanges.
Their dual roadways allowed high volumes of traffic, the need for no or
few traffic lights along with relatively gentle grades and curves allowed
higher speeds. Bicyclists also campaigned for good roads early on.
The first limited access highways were Parkways, so called because of
their often park-like landscaping and, in the metropolitan New York City
area, they connected the region's system of parks. When the German Autobahns
built in the 1930s introduced higher design standards and speeds, road
planners and road-builders in the United States started developing and
building toll roads to similar high standards. The Pennsylvania Turnpike,
which largely followed the path of a partially-built railroad, was the
first of these, opening in 1940 and starting a resurgence of toll collection,
this time to fund limited access highways.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, after an interruption by World War
II, the US resumed building toll roads, but to even higher standards.
One of these roads, the New York State Thruway, had standards that became
the prototype for the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Several other major
toll-roads which connected with the Pennsylvania Turnpike were established
before the creation of the Interstate Highway System. These were the Illinois
Tollway, Indiana Toll Road, Massachusetts Turnpike, Ohio Turnpike, and
New Jersey Turnpike. Kentucky has an extensive system of parkways, built
in the 1960s and 1970s, which began as toll roads; only two of the nine
roads still collect tolls, as state law requires toll collection to cease
once the road's construction bonds are paid off. Oklahoma also has an
extensive system of turnpikes, built about the same time as Kentucky's
parkways.
Occasionally it is mooted that some of the Interstate highways, for example,
those in the sparsely-populated states just east of the Rocky Mountains,
should have been turnpikes. The reason is to have those cross-country
trucking firms that use them pay for them. But there is no movement to
do this.
Interstate Highway System
By 1956, most limited access highways in the eastern United States were
toll roads. In that year, the federal Interstate highway program was established,
funding non-toll roads with 90% federal dollars and 10% state match, giving
little incentive for states to expand their turnpike systems. Funding
rules initially restricted collections of tolls on newly funded roadways,
bridges, and tunnels. In some situations, expansion or rebuilding of a
toll facility using Interstate Highway Program funding resulted in the
removal of existing tolls. This occurred in Virginia on Interstate 64
at the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel when a second parallel roadway to the
regional 1958 bridge-tunnel was completed in 1976.
A toll booth being removed from the Overseas Highway in Florida (1954);
the use of the term freeway is nonstandardSince the completion of the
initial portion of the interstate highway system, regulations were changed,
and portions of toll facilities have been added to the system. Some states
are again looking at toll financing for new roads and maintenance, to
supplement limited federal funding. In some areas, new road projects have
been completed with public-private partnerships funded by tolls, such
as the Pocahontas Parkway near Richmond, Virginia, which features a costly
high level bridge over the shipping channel of the James River and connects
Interstate 95 with Interstate 295 (Virginia) to the south of the city.
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