New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway, one of the early examples of excellent design for high-speed, access-controlled roads.
Toll road authorities were created in Connecticut, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Texas and Virginia. By the end of 1954, these authorities had 1,382 miles of toll roads under construction at costs estimated to total $2.3 billion, and they were making plans and studies for 3,314 additional miles estimated to cost $3.75 billion. The 1,239 miles of toll roads already completed as of January 1955 represented an investment of $1.55 billion.[1]
With few exceptions, these toll roads followed the routes selected by the PRA and the States for the Interstate System, and they represented the heaviest trafficked portions of that System outside the cities. At the height of the toll road boom, the turnpike authorities were investing their funds in interstate highways at about three times the rate of the State highway departments.
It is not an exaggeration to say that most of the motoring public first learned the safety and comfort of driving on access controlled roads on the turnpikes. The toll roads provided the example that later led to mandatory control of access on the Interstate System. The toll roads were high-speed divided highways with wide rights-of-way. Their geometric standards equaled or bettered AASHO’s “desirable” standards for the Interstate System. In addition, the turnpike authorities spent considerable sums to provide amenities for their users—rest areas, landscaping, built-in safety features. A few, notably New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway and portions of the New York Thruway, were planned with the two roadways totally independent of and largely concealed from each other—an advanced technique of highway design pioneered by the PRA and the National Park Service on the Baltimore–Washington Parkway. Most toll roads, however, were built in the monotonous tradition of long tangents that had dominated highway engineering for decades. Nevertheless, the toll roads, as a class, set a high standard of excellence that was hard for the State highway departments with their limited budgets to match. They provided highly visible yardsticks by which to measure the glaring inadequacies of the public highways and whetted the public appetite for better free roads.
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- ↑ Id., pp. 11–14.
