the South Penn right-of-way and build on it a toll road to which adjoining property would have no rights of access. The Legislature was careful to stipulate that the bonds issued by the Commission would not be backed by the credit of the State. This stipulation made the bonds practically unsaleable in the depressed securities market. The project came to a standstill until the summer of 1938, when the Public Works Administration, to stimulate employment, made an outright grant of $26.1 million to the State, with the proviso that construction be completed by June 1940—an almost impossible deadline. At the same time, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation purchased $35 million of the Commission's bonds to complete the turnpike financing.
The Commission let the first grading contracts in November 1938, and thereafter pushed the construction at top speed, day and night with 155 contractors and thousands of men and machines. The 160-mile turnpike was opened to traffic without fanfare on October 1, 1940.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike was the prototype of the modern high-speed heavy-duty Interstate highway. It incorporated the most advanced practice of German and American design engineers on highway grades and curvature and was hailed by many as the safest highway in the world. It had 12-foot traffic lanes, two in each direction, separated by a 10-foot median strip. The right-of-way was 200 feet wide. The steepest grade was 3 percent, as compared to 8 and 9 percent on the nearby Lincoln Highway, and the total climb going over the mountains was only one-third as much as on the Lincoln Highway. For trucks the saving in transit time between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was 5 to 6 hours, a saving sufficient to insure the financial success of the turnpike.
Toll Parkways
While the Pennsylvania Turnpike was under construction, the Connecticut highway department was completing a modern landscaped parkway connecting with Westchester County's Hutchinson River Parkway at the New York State boundary and extending 37 miles to the Housatonic River. This road was planned partly to serve commuters and partly to ease traffic pressure on the congested Boston Post Road. From its opening in June 1938, the Merritt Parkway attracted large volumes of traffic, and within a year, it was carrying 18,800 passenger cars per day. (Commercial traffic was excluded.) Searching for a source of funds with which to extend the parkway northward to Hartford, the Legislature decided to tap this huge flow of traffic, and in June 1939, it imposed a toll for use of the road. The Parkway was amazingly profitable to the State. In its first 35 weeks of operation, 3.4 million motorists, most of whom could have used the Boston Post Road free, cheerfully paid a 10-cent toll to use the parkway's uncongested deluxe facilities. In its first 6 months, the Merritt Parkway grossed $320,644, for a net operating revenue of $280,000.[1]
Westchester County, heavily in debt for its own parkways and suffering from tax shrinkages, was not slow to notice the revenue pouring into the Connecticut toll booth at Greenwich, just east of the State line. In August 1939, the County Board of Supervisors imposed a 10-cent toll on the Hutchinson River Parkway which in 6 months grossed $279,000. However, the bonanza was of short duration, for an order from the New York Court of Appeals forced the county to stop collecting the toll and refund what had already been collected. The court held that, although built entirely with county funds, the Westchester parkways had by use and custom become arteries of the State highway system on which by State law the collection of tolls was prohibited.[2]
The Federal Highways
In most of the western States, national forest highways occupied a strategic position in the State road system. In 1920 the Bureau of Public Roads reported:
Due to the fact that the forest areas lie along the mountain summits, they contain the passes through which the important trunk highways must cross the mountain ranges, and as a consequence many forest road projects are links in important State and national highways. Within the forests are 15,000 miles of roads which form connecting links for State and county highway systems.[3]
In 1912, Congress set aside 10 percent of the receipts from the national forests as a "10-percent fund" for financing forest highways, and with this money, the Forest Service and the Office of Public Roads made a feeble beginning on the enormous task of building the most urgently needed highway connections.[N 1] This work received a much-needed boost from the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 which appropriated $10 million for forest roads for the years 1917 to 1926; and further financial support from the Post Office Appropriation Act of 1919 which provided $3 million each for fiscal years 1919, 1920 and 1921.
To spend these funds, the Bureau of Public Roads rapidly built up an engineering and construction organization equivalent to that of an average State highway department, but scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles of forests. The roads it built in the early twenties were narrow and steep but reasonably adequate for the traffic.[N 2] Much of the construction, especially in the solid rock sections, was done by station contracts under which a "station gang" of cooperative laborers contracted to excavate a 100-foot section of road:
These men attack the ledge in various ways. Sometimes they use the deep 'coyote hole,' burrowing 30 feet into the rock with a tunnel large enough to permit a stooping man to enter with a wheelbarrow. Sometimes the hole is smaller, 8 or 10 feet in depth and less than a foot in diameter. Such a hole is known as a 'boot jack.' One 'coyote hole' on the Cooks-Collins Road in Washington brought down 2,000 yards of rock with 1,700 pounds of black powder.[5]
The BPR also used modern construction equipment such as steam shovels and trucks, much of it war surplus from Army stocks, as well as millions of pounds of surplus TNT explosive in building these early forest highways.
- ↑ Tolls on Merritt Parkway Paid By 3½ Million Cars, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 124, No. 11, Mar. 14, 1940, p. 360.
- ↑ Toll Collection Void on Western Parkway, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 124, No. 10, Mar. 7, 1940, p. 353.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1920, p. 20.
- ↑ L. Hewes, Federal Road Building in the National Forests of the West, Public Roads, Vol. 3, No. 26, Jun. 1920, pp. 15, 25, 26.
- ↑ Id., p. 26.
