history

Warner Lord, is called the Archivist of Madison Town in Connecticut, a distance east from New Haven along Long Island Sound.

He writes:

"In 1811 the Durham-Madison turnpike (Route 79) was chartered, followed by the Essex-Guilford turnpike (Green Hill Road) in 1818 and the Fair Haven turnpike (Route 80) in 1825.  Commercial traffic over these roads could afford to pay the fees charged by the charter companies.

Toll tokens minted for the New Jersey Highway Authority (NJHA) for use on its Garden State Parkway in the 1980s all had the year "1952" stamped on them, 1952 being the year the NJHA was established. With coins the convention is that they are stamped with the year of minting, but that convention wasn't applied to Garden State Parkway toll tokens. (see picture) We've been wrestling with this after we carried an advertisement for a 1952 token.

President-elect Obama is talking about creating millions of jobs making public buildings more efficient, funding 'infrastructure' and modernizing schools. Hopefully most of it will go on weatherstripping the doors and windows of government offices and fluorescent light bulbs in schools, because the promise of vast federal spending on roads will stop toll financing dead.

Jim Crawford, executive director of E-ZPass IAG and a longtime toll man in New Jersey emailed us with comments on the history piece we published on the Washington Crossing Bridge. He says he lived for twenty years just up the hill across from the Washington Crossing State Park in NJ, and picked up a bit of the history.

A little history is prompted by this nice picture of "a bridge on the Delaware River" we found on the web by a local photographer. It is confirmed by the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission as their Washington Crossing Bridge 8 miles (13km) upstream of Trenton.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike says it is going to be celebrated at the Smithsonian affiliated Heinz History center in Pittsburgh in the city's "Tradition of Innovation" exhibition to open shortly. An announcement from the Turnpike quotes CEO Joe Brimmeier as saying: "We’re proud of the fact that the Heinz Center has invited us to participate in this wonderful display.

Fourteen years ago on March 18 1994 on a snowy Friday afternoon there was a David vs Goliath battle at the Triborough Authority's head offices on Randall's Island in New York's East River. The chief executives of seven northeastern toll agencies comprising the Inter Agency Group (IAG) met to vote on whether to give Amtech or Mark IV the big E-ZPass electronic toll systems contract.

Here's an advertisement for a new coach service between Frederick (where TOLLROADSnews is based) and Hagerstown Maryland - one of the first improved roads over the Appalachians. The ad is part of a Historic Marker recently placed by the site of the National Pike in Hagerstown.

From the ad it seems service was something of a monopoly before the Union Line got going. It advertises FARE REDUCED.

Early in the 20th century when muscle and motor power modes coexisted on the roads vehicle classification at toll facilities was complex. That is nicely displayed in this photograph of a posted toll schedule.

The black and white photograph from the Library of Congress collection is rather overexposed or else the print has faded. But fiddling with it in Photoshop (taking Contrast up to about 130) it becomes more or less legible:

TARIFF OF TOLL RATES

Ft Worth Star-Telegram writer OK Carter has a nice column on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Dallas Fort Worth Turnpike. We asked him if we could reprint it and he said he couldn't really refuse since he'd researched the thing using our SEARCH bar. He's exaggerating. He got most of it elsewhere.

I-30 though now tax-supported is still locally known as the Dallas Fort Worth Turnpike.

Some wild history gets around. Bill Stanley writes in the Norwich CT Bulletin newspaper this weekend that Connecticut built "the first turnpike." In fact it was one of the later state turnpikes.

It started construction in 1955 and opened in 1958.

A bunch of states built their tollroads or turnpikes earlier:

- Pennsylvania 1940 (160mi), OH-NJ 1954
- Maine Turnpike 1947 (54mi)
- New Hampshire Turnpike 1950

A nice piece of brief retrospective journalism in USA Today May 20 recognizes electronic tolling as one of the 25 inventions that have changed our lives in the past quarter century. And it credits North Texas Tollway Authority, actually in its then manifestation, the Texas Turnpike Authority, for being the first major toll authority to adopt it.

Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission (DRJTBC) is sending its inventory of tokens to a scrap metal merchant - a reminder of the changing technology of toll collection. The tokens with a face value of 10c each were used to provide commuter discounts for three decades through Dec 2002 when transponder based tolling was introduced by DRJTBC (known colloquially as 'Doctor J').

Opponents of private toll concessions in Texas often suggest that it is a new and radical idea, that governmental ownership has been the norm. On the contrary most of the early toll facilities in Texas were charters or concessions to private operators. Government couldn't raise the money to build the facility so they granted entrepreneurs the right to collect toll revenues in return for investing their money - toll charters they were usually called then.