Why Pay to Use a Road? Somebody Had to Build It

Roads in England were maintained by parishes, each responsible for the stretch within its boundary, using compulsory unpaid labour from local inhabitants for a few days a year. That arrangement worked adequately for local traffic and failed completely for long-distance traffic, since a parish had no incentive to maintain a road heavily used by people passing through and no capacity to fund proper construction. The result by the seventeenth century was that main routes were in a condition contemporaries described as appalling, impassable to wheeled vehicles for parts of the year. Charging those who used a road provided a fund proportional to the traffic causing the wear, which is the argument that produced the whole system.

The arrangement was statutory and local rather than national:

• •An act of parliament created a trust for a specific stretch of road
• •Local landowners and merchants served as trustees without pay
• •The trust borrowed against future toll income to fund improvement
• •Gates and toll houses were built, with the right to collect leased to the highest bidder
• •Charges varied by vehicle, by number of horses and by wheel width
• •The act expired after a set term and had to be renewed

The effect on travel was dramatic and is well documented. Over a thousand trusts were established, controlling around thirty thousand kilometres of road at the peak in the 1830s. Journey times between major cities fell by a factor of three or more over the eighteenth century, with the London to Edinburgh trip falling from around a fortnight to about two days. Road surfaces were transformed by engineers including John Metcalf, Thomas Telford and John McAdam, whose method of building a well-drained surface from graded broken stone was cheap, effective and adopted everywhere. Coaching services expanded enormously on the improved roads, which in turn transformed the movement of mail, goods and information.

Charging for a road that had previously been free provoked violent resistance, and the episodes are a significant part of the history. Gates were destroyed repeatedly across England in the eighteenth century, with organised crowds pulling down toll houses and burning gates, and parliament responded by making destruction of a turnpike gate a capital offence in 1735. The most sustained resistance was in south west Wales between 1839 and 1843, where crowds led by men in women's clothing destroyed gates across several counties in protest at the number of gates, the level of charges and wider rural distress, and the disturbances were serious enough to prompt a royal commission whose report largely accepted the grievances and led to reorganisation of the trusts in Wales.

Railways destroyed the business within a generation, taking long-distance passengers and freight from the roads so completely that toll income collapsed and trusts could not service their debts, and the last were wound up by the 1880s with road maintenance transferred to county authorities funded from taxation. The principle returned in the twentieth century for expensive individual structures, with bridges and tunnels charged directly, and then for whole motorway networks in France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Electronic collection has removed the queues that made the older arrangement unpopular. Congestion charging in cities applies the same logic to the cost imposed on other users rather than to construction, which is a different justification for the same mechanism.

Parish maintenance by compulsory labour could not fund roads used mainly by through traffic, so charging users supplied a fund proportional to the wear. Over a thousand statutory trusts controlled around thirty thousand kilometres by the 1830s and cut journey times by a factor of three or more. Railways destroyed the income within a generation. The principle returned for bridges, tunnels and motorway networks, with electronic collection removing the queues.