Paved Roads & Public Money. Richard DeLuca
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.
Last of all, MacDonald addressed the matter of funding, which he requested be doubled to $500,000 per year. In addition, he suggested that legislative appropriations be made in multiyear intervals, so that his office together with the towns could plan for future improvements. To help pay for the additional funding, MacDonald suggested that the income generated by the registration and licensing fees collected by the Department of Motor Vehicles be used exclusively for the highway program. It was an early example of a user tax applied to the age of automobility. Much the way those who crossed a bridge might pay a toll to help repair the bridge, it was considered only fair that those who owned the cars that ran on and damaged the state’s highways should pay for the repair of those highways. As had been the case since the program’s inception, the remainder of the funds for Connecticut’s good roads program would continue to come from the general funds of the state.6
With these important modifications agreed to by the legislature in 1907—state responsibility for project selection and ongoing maintenance, the designation of a high-priority trunk line system for cross-state traffic, and the funds collected by the Department of Motor Vehicles to be used only for highway improvements—MacDonald released the state’s good roads program from the shackles of history and created the state’s first truly modern highway program, one with a forward-looking agenda.
The legislature confirmed this new approach by adopting the commissioner’s designated trunk line system into law as the state’s official highway network. Over the years, this network of state highways would continue to expand, reaching 1,340 highway miles by 1913 and 1,566 miles by 1923. However, at the core of the state system from the start were fourteen major cross-state routes. These included three east-west corridors: Route 1 from Greenwich to Rhode Island; Route 6 from Danbury across the central portion of Connecticut to Killingly; and in the northern portion of the state, Route 44 from Salisbury to Putnam. And there were three north-south corridors: Route 7 from Norwalk to North Canaan; Routes 5 and 10 in the center of the state from New Haven to Suffield and Granby, respectively; and in eastern Connecticut, Routes 2 and 32 from New London to Stafford and Thompson, respectively.7
Trunk line system, 1923. Highways function best when part of a system of local feeder roads, secondary highways, and main through routes.
Connecticut Highway Department
In addition, various secondary