funding for other transportation programs, such as aviation, and later to nontransportation social programs as well.
In the 1920s, with the federal-state partnership firmly established by the new highway act and much of the state’s trunk line system of roads and bridges now firmly in state hands, Connecticut’s highway program entered a new phase. As car engines became more powerful, highwaymen turned their attention from paving to other roadway characteristics, such as lane width, gradient, and sight line. Existing roadways were not just paved over but straightened; bridges were widened; hills were flattened to lower the steepness of a grade; and other dangerous situations, such as at-grade railroad crossings were modified or eliminated. At times, the need for such improvements resulted in a complete relocation of a roadway, moved to a new right-of-way and rebuilt to modern specifications. And of course, as trucks became larger, small bridges needed to be rebuilt to accommodate heavier loads.42
To pay for this never-ending cycle of highway improvements, Connecticut, like many states, resorted to a tax on gasoline. Connecticut passed its first gas tax law in 1921, imposing a one-cent per gallon tax on all gasoline sold in the state. Two years later, in keeping with the idea that highway users should pay directly for the care of the roads they traveled, gas tax revenue in Connecticut was dedicated to a separate Highway Fund to be used for highway purposes only, at the discretion of the state highway commissioner. As a result, by 1927, the state highway program had three main sources of revenue: the state gas tax (by then 2¢ per gallon), fees charged to register motor vehicles and license drivers, and federal monies from the general fund of the United States dedicated to the construction and maintenance of the state’s federal highway system. Such was the increase in motor vehicle registrations and gasoline consumption that by 1928, despite the expanding responsibilities of the Connecticut Highway Department, the state’s highway program had become financially self-sufficient, able to fund projects from these three dedicated sources of revenue without the need for money from the state’s general fund.43
The Connecticut Highway Department was the largest and fastest-growing agency of state government, with an annual budget that grew from $45,000 in 1896 to $16,000,000 in 1928. That year, the department was reorganized into five bureaus: engineering and construction, business administration, maintenance, roadside development, and boundaries and right-of-way. The offices of the newly reconstituted department were then relocated to a new State Office Building constructed on Capitol Avenue in Hartford, its very existence a sign that other areas of state government were growing too in their bureaucracy, albeit not as rapidly as the Connecticut Highway Department.44
In 1931, the Connecticut Highway Department expanded its responsibilities yet again by creating a town-aid program through which it passed state funds to towns for use in local highway improvements, in much the way that the national government passed funds to the state for use on federal-aid highways. The town-aid program represented the final piece of an interlocking, three-tiered program of highway improvements (federal, state, and town) held together by a powerful megagovernment bureaucracy controlling interagency financing.45
Though highway revenues declined during the Great Depression to a level of about twelve million dollars per year, the Connecticut Highway Department remained one of the most powerful state agencies, still able to fund highway improvements on a pay-as-you-go basis without the need for long-term borrowing by the state. In a span of just four decades, Connecticut highways had gone from a network of unkempt nineteenth-century earthen turnpikes to a modern system of primary, secondary, and local highways (and bridges) built for the auto age, maintained by a three-level megagovernment arrangement of highway agencies, and paid for one hundred percent with public tax dollars.
Only one blemish spoiled this nearly perfect picture. In the state’s larger cities, and most especially along the lower post road from Greenwich to New Haven, a new phenomenon appeared on Connecticut highways: bumper-to-bumper traffic. As travel speeds, traffic congestion, and the number of traffic accidents all increased, engineers were suddenly faced with new questions: was there a limit to the amount of traffic a normal highway could handle? If so, how were they to accommodate the seemingly endless desire for travel and commerce unleashed by the automobile, bus, and truck?
The answer they devised involved a new kind of highway, a highway so different from what had come before that it might even be considered a new mode of transportation, one uniquely adapted to the age of automobility. That new kind of highway—where a driver entered and exited a road only at designated interchanges, and in between was able to travel at high speed unaffected by roadside distractions—was in effect a concrete railroad for the automobile, truck, and bus. Highway engineers had a name for it: the controlled-access expressway. In the 1930s, one of the first of its kind in the nation was built across Connecticut as part of the state’s first high-speed highway link between New York and Boston. Reminiscent of the privately owned New York & Boston Automobile Boulevard toll road first proposed in 1907, the new controlled-access highway would be owned by the state and built with public funds, though in the end it too would become a toll highway—one known as the Merritt Parkway.
Highways and the Progressive Movement
In the half century from 1870 to 1920, a broad social movement known as progressivism touched many aspects of American life, including highway transportation.
As the twentieth century turned and immigration from Europe continued unabated, the population of Connecticut reached more than 900,000 persons, 56 percent of whom lived in sixteen industrialized cities around the state—on less than 10 percent of the state’s land area. Problems of overcrowding, sanitation, and traffic control became commonplace. Traditional politics and boss cronyism could no longer handle such concentrated and chaotic growth effectively. In an effort to create a different, more modern social order, government at all levels became more specialized, more bureaucratic, organized around bureaus or commissions headed by professional managers whose expertise was more technical than political.
The approach was not unlike that adopted by railroads and other big businesses in the decades following the Civil War, as private corporations of all kinds grew larger and more complex. In the world of commerce, this bureaucratic approach transformed traditional market capitalism into a new kind of business model referred to as managerial capitalism. In much the same way, as town, state, and national governments grew in size and complexity to regulate problems created by urban growth, they created a new kind of model for governing, one that might similarly be termed managerial government.
The establishment of an independent Highway Commission in 1895 and its reorganization into the powerful state agency known as the Connecticut Highway Department in the first decades of the new century provides a perfect example in transportation of the transition from a form of government where elected representatives of the people were responsible for important governmental activity—remember the legislators who traveled the state in 1897 to gather information for the state’s first highway improvement program—to a new kind of government, where most governmental duties were now executed by unelected, professional managers whose specialized expertise made them not only preferable but necessary. In the case of highways, the matter was even more entrenched. In much the way that managerial capitalism was further complicated by corporate mergers and interlocking directorates, the new model of managerial government for highway transportation was further complicated by the interlocking relationships of interdependent federal, state, and town highway agencies, in Connecticut and throughout the nation.
This transition to both managerial capitalism and managerial government was itself part of a broad social movement known as progressivism that touched on many aspects of American life in the half century from 1870 to 1920. The progressive agenda included such movements as the fight for healthier housing in the tenements of New York and Chicago; women’s suffrage and alcoholic temperance; labor struggles for an eight-hour day and a ban on the use of child workers in factories; an attempt to purify the population through the pseudoscience of eugenics, where persons considered unfit to have children were sterilized to prevent
