owned mass transportation, and as a result transformed the relationship between Connecticut cities and the rural towns that surrounded them. That same year, with revenues declining heavily and unable to cover the interest on its long-term debt, the New Haven Railroad filed for bankruptcy.
Paving the Way
In the first decades of the twentieth century, state and federal governments created a highway network based on a hierarchy of road types and funding responsibilities that continues to this day.
TOWARD A STATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM
Ever since Connecticut’s earliest days as an English colony, the construction and maintenance of all highways had been the responsibility of individual towns. In the English tradition, the task was accomplished through the use of statute labor, whereby men of a certain age were required by law to work a specified number of days each year on building and repairing the roads in their town. As might be expected, improvements were at best uneven, and at worse nonexistent. Following the Revolution, the responsibility for improving and maintaining major highways in Connecticut was given to privately owned turnpike companies, chartered by the state, who for their efforts were allowed to collect tolls from passing travelers. While this method fostered travel by stagecoach, which helped to stitch the newly independent colonies into an economic whole, it too proved problematic. Such was the ongoing cost of maintenance that some 90 percent of Connecticut turnpike corporations failed to earn enough income to provide their investors with any significant return on their investment. Therefore, as the nineteenth century wore on, companies found ways to abandon their unprofitable routes, after which responsibility for the roadway reverted back to the local community. The last privately owned turnpike in Connecticut, the Derby Turnpike into New Haven, returned to public use on February 9, 1897, after nearly one hundred years in private hands, precisely because it had been one of the few profitable toll roads in Connecticut.1
With all highways in the state back in public hands, the legislature went about formulating a statewide program to improve Connecticut roads. To gauge the scope of the work to be done, the legislature appointed a committee of nine men—one state senator together with one representative from each of the state’s eight counties—to hold public hearings and collect information from selectmen around the state as to the number of miles of road that needed rebuilding in each town. The committee’s report, published two years later, noted that there were 2,300 miles of road in the state in need of improvement, half to be improved by a macadam surface of crushed stone, compacted in layers and held together by a sprinkling of oil or tar, and half to be improved as simple gravel roads. The total cost of such a program was estimated at six million dollars. To finance the program, the committee recommended that in wealthier towns with grand lists in excess of one million dollars, the cost be paid two-thirds by the state and one third by the town; in smaller towns with grand lists less than one million dollars, the state would pay three-quarters of the cost and the town one quarter. The choice of which roads to improve, and the advertising of bids for construction, were to be handled by the towns, with the state commissioner having the power to inspect the results and force additional repairs if necessary. After each highway was improved, it was to be kept in good repair by town authorities. The committee recommended a funding level of $250,000 per year, which meant that the six million dollars of recommended improvements would not be completed for twenty-four years.2
As proposed by the legislative committee of 1897, the state’s first highway program had one disturbing characteristic. Instead of investing control of the program in James MacDonald as the state’s first highway commissioner, the program looked backward to the long-held tradition of town responsibility with regard to highway improvements. Which routes were to be modernized, what surface would be used on the roadway, and maintenance of the improved roads were all left to the towns, historically the source of poor road conditions.
It should also be noted that the slow pace of the program, which at recommended funding levels would take more than two decades to complete, suggested that the program was undertaken in response to the demands of the bicycle and the good roads movement, and not the automobile. Neither the state’s first good roads law in 1895 that established the Connecticut Highway Commission, nor the legislature’s first road program as conceived in 1899, took much heed of the horseless carriage, which in all fairness had yet to appear in sufficient numbers to reveal its full significance.
Connecticut’s town-oriented highway program continued under the supervision of Commissioner MacDonald for more than a decade, by which time the difficulties inherent in the program from the beginning had become apparent. The issue came to a head in March 1907, when MacDonald testified before the legislature’s Committee on Appropriations and Roads, Bridges and Rivers responsible for the road program. In his address, MacDonald made several points. First, he complained that the roads that had been improved during the previous twelve years were not being maintained by the towns and were “fast passing into a bad state of repair.” Why continue in the same manner, MacDonald asked, “if the roads upon which we have been expending our money are neglected?” Rather than continue to spend good money to no good end, MacDonald asked that the legislature make highway maintenance the responsibility of the state highway commissioner.3
Also by 1907, the automobile had become a phenomenon to be reckoned with in Connecticut. In that year, the state established a Department of Motor Vehicles to regulate the sale and ownership of the nearly three thousand automobiles now owned and operated by Connecticut residents. Higher-speed automotive travel was wreaking havoc with roadway surfaces, so that even well-made improvements were not lasting as long as they might have otherwise under horse-and-buggy travel. Clearly, the durability of improvements had to match the changing traffic conditions, which ultimately meant asphalt paving for all roadways in the state to accommodate the high speeds and gross weight of automobiles and trucks.
Equally important, town selection of projects had produced, rather than a network of contiguous highway improvements, a patchwork of disjointed improvements around the state, many segments chosen specifically to appease local interests. To rectify that situation, MacDonald formulated a trunk line system comprised of 1,070 miles of the state’s most important thoroughfares, whose improvement from this point forward would become the program’s top priority. Designation of a trunk line network redirected the focus of the highway program to routes that not only provided for longer-distance travel across and through Connecticut, but also included among their number the most heavily traveled thoroughfares in the state.
MacDonald’s attempt to redirect the focus of his program toward a statewide trunk line system was also prompted by a proposal from businessmen in Connecticut and Massachusetts looking to solve the problem of long-distance travel by harking back to the days of the privately owned toll road. In January 1907, two months before MacDonald’s speech to the road committee, two groups of investors, one in Boston, the other in Hartford, submitted petitions to their respective state legislatures to incorporate the “New York & Boston Automobile Boulevard,” a privately owned toll highway that was to run from Mount Vernon, New York, through Greenwich, New Haven, and Middletown in Connecticut, and on to Boston in a line that approximated a direct airline route between the two terminal cities. The plan was to build a mostly limited access highway consisting of “two broad roadways, one for cars going east and the other for cars going west … [with] entrances every few miles for its entire length.”4
On July 18, 1907, the charter bill received an unfavorable report from the legislative committee that reviewed it—no doubt influenced by the change in policy advocated by MacDonald the previous March—and within a week was withdrawn from both the House and the Senate.5 Of course, rejection of the toll road charter in Connecticut doomed the entire enterprise, but the effort remains significant as one of the earliest attempts to address the issue of long-distance interstate travel by constructing an unprecedented new kind of roadway, the controlled-access highway, something that would not come to fruition in Connecticut until the construction of the Merritt Parkway in the 1930s.
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