MORALE:The Importance of History

The US Bureau of Roads, forerunner of the FHWA tried to sabotage the construction of the Penn Pike. The BPR was led by virulently anti-toll bureaucrats, who found tolls so offensive they resorted to fabrication and vitriol whenever tolls were suggested. The Bureau predicted the Penn Pike would carry 260,000 vehicles/year or 715/day, a number which deserves a hallowed place in any listing of spectacularly incorrect forecasts. The BPR’s longtime director Thomas H MacDonald declared on several occasions that the Pike would never earn the tolls to repay the loans taken out to finance it. Fortunately no one listened to him in Pennsylvania.

Traffic Underestimate

In its first 10 days of operation the PP carried 10k veh/day, 14-times the BPR forecast. It carried 565k vehicles in its first three months, a ridership which the forecasts from Washington DC said should have taken 25 months to accumulate. The Turnpike’s own T&R consultants incidentally were under too – predicting daily traffic of 3.6k (1.3m/yr) but they were only off by half. In its first year it took 2.4m tolls.

What almost no one appreciated beforehand was that the Penn Pike was not an improved road but a completely new kind of road – a quantum leap forward – and something which no forecaster could handle. As such it generated great excitement, huge media attention and lots of hyperbole. It was called “a peach of a road” by the governor, “the Dream Highway” “America’s Superhighway” etc in colorful magazine features and newsreels.. Greyhound and Goodrich tires used it in their ads. FORTUNE noted it was “the first American highway better than the American car.”

And all that helped the Penn Pike capture the imagination of people in a way that made it impossible for any politician in the immediate postwar years to be anything but enthusiastic about roadbuilding.

How it came about is fascinating. A trucking assoc lobbyist William Sutherland, a state bureaucrat Victor Lecoq and a new state politician Cliff Paterson from the Mon Valley got talking over dinner about the horrors of travel over US-22 or US-30 to the state capital Harrisburg. Lecoq told of hearing from Ed Flickinger, a colleague who played as a kid in overgrown half built railroad tunnels in the mountains. Flickinger said it should be investigated as a superhighway. Lecoq went on an exploratory visit and turned up the tunnels and in a famous letter to his boss reported “We certainly have something.”

They had rediscovered the remains of the South Pennsylvania Railroad, a line on which 6,000 workers had labored in 1884 and 1885 in the employ of a joint venture of steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie and William Vanderbilt of the New York Central. The South Penn RR was to undercut the freight rates of the Pennsylvania Central on the important route Philly to Pittsburgh. Work stopped abruptly Sept 85 after the banker Pierpont Morgan, concerned about overbuilding, brokered a settlement between the rival railroads. For half a century the 60% complete tunnels and earthworks were increasingly masked by forest regrowth.

The new state rep Patterson introduced a resolution for a feasibility study. He was lucky in that a local AP reporter knew about the tunnels too and began contriving a series of stories about plans for a revolutionary “weather-proof tunnel highway.” Ice, snow and fog were a great menace on the 8% and 9% slopes of US-30 and US-22 that motorists were forced to use pre-PP. As the stories ran in newspapers all over PA, support broadened. Depression bonds funded it and the first 255km (160mi) were built in just 20 months. The pike had single tube tunnels to start with, but apart from tight loops the bulk of the road was built to 1960s geometric standards when it opened in 1940.

TV history of OOCEA

OOCEA collaborated recently with a local TV station WMFE to produce a short video history of toll roads in the Orlando area. 28mins long and called “Decades of Motion” it’s a modern version, maybe, of the PP’s book. It is well done, a neat portrayal of why the authority was created, some of its struggles over the years and how it responded to local needs. Many of the leaders of the authority past and present get to talk. It must be helpful in gaining public understanding of tolling and the toll authority. It puts some human faces on an otherwise faceless bureaucracy. And it provides citizens with a sense of the rationale for toll roads. (Contact Steve Pustelnyk OOCEA407 316 3830)