Turnpike Roads

Roads with fees attached to using them.

Essential part of the Revolution of Transport in the 18th century. These roads were built by private organizations, so-called turnpike trusts. These organizations were usually a conglomeration of several merchants and/or landowners. Each of these organizations was established through a separate Act of Parliament, which gave the authority to collect tolls and mortgage debts, but at the same time prohibited that the trustees did not profit directly from these tolls and set a maximum level for the tolls.

These acts were always established in cycles, so that during any cycle a big amount of new roads could be built and so that also the transportation network could be improved. The biggest wave of new turnpike trusts and thus new turnpike roads was in the time of the 1750s and 1760s. After the last Acts of Parliament had been authorized by 1830, there were over 900 turnpike trusts managing about 20,000 miles of road.

Apart from building new roads, the turnpike trusts had the obligation to keep the roads in good shape and improve them whenever necessary with the money they made from the tolls. The tolls were collected at so-called tollhouses, where they had fixed charges for every vehicle and traveler depending on the means of travel, the class of the traveler, and the duration and length of their travel.

Before turnpike trusts were given the task to build and improve roads, it was usually taken care of by local governments, i.e. local parishes. Thus turnpike trusts were not building an entirely new road network, but first of all used the already existing roads, improved these, but of course also added new roads. Turnpike roads and turnpike trusts had an immense impact on the way and speed goods and people could now be transported throughout the country and were thus an important factor to the Industrial Revolution and the mass production of commodities.

Sources

Bogart, Dan. “Turnpike Trusts, Infrastructure Investment, and the Road Transportation Revolution in Eighteenth-Century England”. The Journal of Economic History 65 (2005): 540-543.

Buchanan, B.J. “The Evolution of the English Turnpike: Lessons from a Case Study”. The Economic History Review 39 (1986): 223-243.