The transportation revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries embodied dramatic reductions in passenger fares and freight charges as well as improvements in the quality of services. It also had far reaching effects on economic development by contributing to the growth of domestic and international trade.¹

In order to better understand this phenomenon, many scholars have examined the causes of the transport revolution. A wide variety of factors have been emphasized including technological improvements, changes in the organization of firms and markets, and increases in infrastructure investment.² My dissertation extends the literature by examining the contribution of turnpike trusts to changes in the road transport sector in eighteenth-century England.

Turnpike trusts were private organizations that financed road improvements by levying tolls. They were established by individual Acts of Parliament. The acts appointed local landowners and merchants to a body of trustees and gave them the authority to levy a maximum schedule of tolls and to issue mortgage debt secured upon the income from the tolls. Most acts also required that trustees could not earn direct profits by mandating that all toll revenues be devoted to road improvements and other expenses.

Turnpike trusts were established in cycles throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The first wave of adoption occurred during the 1720s, when a number of trusts were established along the major roads leading into London and other large cities. The second wave of adoption took place during the 1750s and 1760s, and was the most significant in terms of the number of trusts and the mileage covered. The second wave was also distinctive in that turnpike trusts were established along most intercity routes throughout the country. The last two waves of adoption took place during the 1790s and 1820s, and included the establishment of trusts along secondary roads near large cities such as London, Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle. By the end of the adoption process in the 1830s there were around 900 turnpike trusts managing approximately 20,000 miles or 17 percent of the entire road network in England and Wales.

Turnpike trusts emerged as the dominant supplier of road maintenance and investment along major roadways, but they were not the first to have this responsibility. Nearly all turnpike trusts were established along existing roads that were previously maintained by local governments (i.e., parishes). Unlike turnpike trusts, parishes did not have access to external sources of funding, such as tolls or bonds. Instead, they financed road improvements by levying local property taxes and by claiming up to six days of labor per year from their residents. Parishes were also different because they were subject to the oversight of county magistrates, who had the discretionary authority to levy fines upon parishes if they failed to provide adequate road repair.

The transition from parishes to turnpike trusts changed the way road improvements were organized and financed, but it is not clear that the transition increased road investment or that it generated benefits to road-users. Earlier scholars, such as Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, argued that turnpike trusts were necessary for greater road expenditure because parishes were unwilling to improve their roads. The Webbs claimed that parishes were restricted by the use of local labor and property taxes and that turnpike trusts eliminated this constraint by levying tolls.³

Their positive assessment of turnpike trusts was seemingly confirmed by William Albert and Eric Pawson, who documented that freight charges and passenger travel times fell dramatically during the 1750s and 1760s, just after turnpike trusts were established along most of the major roads.⁴

An alternative view of turnpike trusts emerged in the work of John Ginarlis and Sidney Pollard, who provided the first estimates of total parish and turnpike trust road expenditure during the eighteenth century.⁵

Their estimates indicate that parish road spending was already significant by 1750 and that total road expenditure did not increase in real terms between 1750 and 1800 because rising turnpike expenditures were offset by falling parish expenditures. These findings suggest that parishes were willing to finance greater road expenditures with their own tax revenues and that turnpike trusts may have been adopted because the tolls shifted the tax burden to external road-users. Dorian Gerhold also challenged the conventional view of turnpike trusts by studying their impact on the transport sector.⁶ Like Albert and Pawson, Gerhold argued that turnpike trusts increased efficiency by improving road quality. However, he also argued that innovations in horse breeding and increases in the size of carriage firms had a greater impact on freight charges during the 1750s and 1760s.

My dissertation reassesses the impact of turnpike trusts and shows that they raised road expenditure and generated substantial benefits to road-users and the economy. In the first case, I use new information on total parish expenditures, excluding poor relief, to show that Ginarlis and Pollard substantially overestimated total parish road expenditure between 1750 and 1800. I also provide new estimates of total road expenditure by drawing upon a sample of account books drawn from archival sources. The new estimates show that turnpike trusts accounted for the majority of a four-fold increase in total road expenditure between 1730 and 1800. This finding is also corroborated by microdata, which show that road expenditure per-mile increased by more than a factor of ten after turnpike trusts replaced parishes along individual roads. Overall, the new evidence on road expenditure demonstrates that turnpike trusts spent substantially more than parishes and ultimately improved road quality.

The preceding results suggest that there may be a causal link between turnpike trusts and greater road expenditure, but they do not rule out the possibility that parishes would have increased their road spending had turnpike trusts been absent. This concern arises because turnpike trusts were generally adopted in areas that were developing, and therefore, the demand for road infrastructure was likely to be increasing. This issue is addressed by studying the behavior of parishes that managed roads where petitions to establish turnpike trusts failed in Parliament.⁷

I begin by showing that turnpike petitions failed for reasons unrelated to the demand for road investment. Then I estimate the road expenditures of parishes where turnpike petitions failed. The experiment demonstrates that in some cases parishes increased their spending, particularly if they were able to coordinate with one another. However, in the majority of cases parishes did not change their behavior, which suggests that the adoption of turnpike trusts did indeed cause road expenditure to increase.

Besides looking at the effects on road investment, I also examined whether turnpike trusts generated benefits to road-users in terms of lower transport costs and higher quality services. The impact of turnpike trusts is controversial because the tolls may have offset the benefits associated with road improvements. In addition, there may have been other innovations that had a larger impact on the transport costs, such as improvements in horse breeding or organizational changes within carriage firms.⁸

To address these issues, I tested whether turnpike trusts lowered freight charges by using data on land carriage rates. Land carriage rates were the maximum price that a carrier could charge for the shipment of a ton of goods between two cities. They stem from a law passed in the 1690s, which authorized local magistrates to set freight rates so that carriers could not raise prices through collusion.

Land carriage rates are particularly useful for this study because they represent a good proxy for actual freight charges. They are also available for a large number of city-pairs, both before and after turnpike trusts were adopted along their route. To exploit this source, I collected a sample of over 5,000 land carriage rates from 130 city-pairs. I then matched the yearly observations with information on the fraction of route mileage managed by turnpike trusts. Finally, I tested whether land carriage rates fell after turnpike trusts were adopted along the routes of individual city-pairs. The analysis yielded two key findings. First, land carriage rates declined by approximately 40 percent in real terms between 1750 and 1800. Second, land carriage rates tended to fall shortly after turnpike trusts were adopted, in some cases by as much as 30 percent. These findings show that turnpike trusts did not raise freight charges by introducing tolls. They also suggest that turnpike trusts made a significant contribution to lower freight charges by improving road quality.

The effects of turnpike trusts are also evident in the passenger sector, where travel times fell by around 60 percent between 1750 and 1820. As before, I matched the travel time data with information on turnpike trusts and show that travel times fell shortly after turnpike trusts were adopted. Therefore, the evidence suggests turnpike trusts made an additional contribution by widening roads and limiting congestion.

Turnpike trusts generated substantial benefits to road-users because they directly addressed a number of problems in the parish system. One problem was that parishes could not force external road-users to contribute to the costs of maintenance and investment. This problem was especially relevant along the major highways leading into London, where wagons and carriages often passed through dozens of parishes along their route. Turnpike trusts resolved the through-traffic problem because the tolls forced external road-users to contribute to the costs of improvement. The tolls also allowed trusts to price discrimination against different types of road-users and thereby generate the necessary revenues without incurring substantial deadweight losses.

Turnpike trusts also raised road investment by relieving borrowing constraints faced by parishes. Legal restrictions on issuing debt forced parishes to finance road improvements using current revenues from property taxes. Turnpike trusts eliminated this problem because they were able to issue debt at interest rates below 5 percent for most of the eighteenth century.⁹

Interest rates were low because turnpike trusts could use the toll revenues as collateral and because local investors expected to earn indirect returns through higher property values.

Turnpike trusts were also successful in raising road investment because they addressed coordination problems in the parish system. Coordination was relevant because the benefits associated with improving one road segment often depended on the investments in another segment. Turnpike trusts were able to address this issue by unifying control over an entire roadway or a network of roads. Some turnpikes also created inter-locking bodies of trustees, which aligned the interests of numerous trusts within a particular county.

Perhaps the important lesson from the history turnpike trusts is that organizations and institutions play a crucial role in increasing transportation investment. This is a particularly important lesson in today's environment, where the demands for infrastructure are growing even more rapidly than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.