The Private Toll Bridge Menace
As interstate roads were completed and connected with each other, the growing stream of traffic attracted another class of highway parasite—the private toll bridge promoter. By 1928, private bridges were becoming a serious threat to the free use of the highways. In 1928 alone, Congress granted 75 franchises for private toll bridges over interstate waters and the States issued many others. Most of these were stock promotion projects, giving favored cliques a strangle hold for years on key sites on the main highway arteries on terms inadequate to protect the public interest.
Chief MacDonald spoke out against this trend at the 1928 AASHO meeting:
Private toll-bridge Interests are becoming bolder and obstructing the public’s business. They are attempting to defeat legislation unfavorable to themselves and are obstructing the efforts of highway departments to carry on State projects.
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There is much confusion in the public mind on this question. In all sincerity many have endorsed the private toll bridge franchise on the theory that it is desirable to have bridges, and if the public funds are not sufficient or available, rather than do without, it is better to grant a toll franchise to private interests. This is not the issue . . . The real question is the very simple one of whether it is sound public policy to grant the right to collect a private profit from the user of the highway. The answer ought to be a vigorous and authoritative ‘No.’ There is no place on the public highway today for the privately owned toll bridge.[1]
MacDonald was not against toll bridges as such, but he thought they should be owned and operated by the State or other public authority and freed from toll as soon as the bonds were paid off. This type of financing had been provided for by Congress in an act approved March 3, 1927, which permitted Federal-aid funds to be used on publicly owned toll bridges on the Federal-aid system. Such financing had also been adopted by the Port of New York Authority for four monumental and costly bridges, including the immense George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River.
Farmers in Paneytown, Ark., ford stream to avoid the fee on a private toll bridge.
A toll house at the approach to a publicly owned and operated bridge on U.S. 1 in South Carolina, 1921.
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- ↑ T. MacDonald, The Freedom of the Road, American Highways, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Jan. 1929, pp. 6, 7.
