The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

148 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
that individual investment in roads would have to make way for
societal or public investment, Wooldridge had this to say:
Exactly the opposite situation prevailed for most of the important
roads of the nineteenth century. From 1800 to 1830 private
investment poured into thousands of miles of turnpikes in the
United States, notwithstanding the miniscule return the capital
earned, and hundreds of turnpike companies built roads that
carried the rivers of emigration to the old Northwest and the
products of the newly settled states back to the seaboard. For
the first third of the century, constructing the roads that were
the only means of transportation to and communication with
most parts of the West remained a function of private capital.
An occasional exception, like the famous National Road going
west from Cumberland, Maryland, was a deviation from the
norm.
The history of the grandfather of all the turnpike companies,
the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike Corporation, chartered
in 1792, has much in common with all the rest. Pennsylvania
had no desire on principle to commit its program of road
building to private enterprise, and in fact had resorted unsuccessfully
to several other expedients before chartering its first
turnpike company. That was the pattern in most of the states
where the companies later flourished; in the late 1700’s, the
states tried lotteries, forced road service from local landowners,
grants-in-aid to localities, and even offers of large acreages to
contractors if they would build roads to the interior. All these
measures failed, as well as the routine expedient of levying
taxes and spending them on the highways of the states. None
of the states’ financing schemes could begin to supply the volume
of capital necessary for the improvements the people were
more and more vociferously demanding as they in ever larger
numbers pushed to the West. An economist might have told the
states that if the people needed roads that badly, it ought to be
a simple matter to levy sufficient taxes to pay for them, but then
as now political reality was not always conducive to economic
models, particularly when the people using the roads were
often using them to leave the states. In view of the durable consensus
on the necessity of publicly financed roads that developed well