Only one blemish spoiled this nearly perfect picture. In the state’s larger cities, and most especially along the lower post road from Greenwich to New Haven, a new phenomenon appeared on Connecticut highways: bumper-to-bumper traffic. As travel speeds, traffic congestion, and the number of traffic accidents all increased, engineers were suddenly faced with new questions: was there a limit to the amount of traffic a normal highway could handle? If so, how were they to accommodate the seemingly endless desire for travel and commerce unleashed by the automobile, bus, and truck?
The answer they devised involved a new kind of highway, a highway so different from what had come before that it might even be considered a new mode of transportation, one uniquely adapted to the age of automobility. That new kind of highway—where a driver entered and exited a road only at designated interchanges, and in between was able to travel at high speed unaffected by roadside distractions—was in effect a concrete railroad for the automobile, truck, and bus. Highway engineers had a name for it: the controlled-access expressway. In the 1930s, one of the first of its kind in the nation was built across Connecticut as part of the state’s first high-speed highway link between New York and Boston. Reminiscent of the privately owned New York & Boston Automobile Boulevard toll road first proposed in 1907, the new controlled-access highway would be owned by the state and built with public funds, though in the end it too would become a toll highway—one known as the Merritt Parkway.
Highways and the Progressive Movement
In the half century from 1870 to 1920, a broad social movement known as progressivism touched many aspects of American life, including highway transportation.
As the twentieth century turned and immigration from Europe continued unabated, the population of Connecticut reached more than 900,000 persons, 56 percent of whom lived in sixteen industrialized cities around the state—on less than 10 percent of the state’s land area. Problems of overcrowding, sanitation, and traffic control became commonplace. Traditional politics and boss cronyism could no longer handle such concentrated and chaotic growth effectively. In an effort to create a different, more modern social order, government at all levels became more specialized, more bureaucratic, organized around bureaus or commissions headed by professional managers whose expertise was more technical than political.
The approach was not unlike that adopted by railroads and other big businesses in the decades following the Civil War, as private corporations of all kinds grew larger and more complex. In the world of commerce, this bureaucratic approach transformed traditional market capitalism into a new kind of business model referred to as managerial capitalism. In much the same way, as town, state, and national governments grew in size and complexity to regulate problems created by urban growth, they created a new kind of model for governing, one that might similarly be termed managerial government.
The establishment of an independent Highway Commission in 1895 and its reorganization into the powerful state agency known as the Connecticut Highway Department in the first decades of the new century provides a perfect example in transportation of the transition from a form of government where elected representatives of the people were responsible for important governmental activity—remember the legislators who traveled the state in 1897 to gather information for the state’s first highway improvement program—to a new kind of government, where most governmental duties were now executed by unelected, professional managers whose specialized expertise made them not only preferable but necessary. In the case of highways, the matter was even more entrenched. In much the way that managerial capitalism was further complicated by corporate mergers and interlocking directorates, the new model of managerial government for highway transportation was further complicated by the interlocking relationships of interdependent federal, state, and town highway agencies, in Connecticut and throughout the nation.
This transition to both managerial capitalism and managerial government was itself part of a broad social movement known as progressivism that touched on many aspects of American life in the half century from 1870 to 1920. The progressive agenda included such movements as the fight for healthier housing in the tenements of New York and Chicago; women’s suffrage and alcoholic temperance; labor struggles for an eight-hour day and a ban on the use of child workers in factories; an attempt to purify the population through the pseudoscience of eugenics, where persons considered unfit to have children were sterilized to prevent them from diluting the general population with unsuitable offspring; the City Beautiful movement that sought to build grand boulevards, plazas, and civic centers, and thereby improve the moral character of those surrounded by such man-made beauty; the creation of the nation’s first national park and forest lands as part of a larger effort to conserve America’s natural resources; and numerous other expressions of what was considered progressive thought.46 However, it is important to note that the progressive movement was hardly a uniform phenomenon. Though heavily promoted by a rising urban middle class eager to replace small-town values with big-city ideals, the old ways continued to exist side by side with the new throughout the progressive era, especially in Connecticut where rural majorities continued to exert antiprogressive influence in the state legislature whenever they could.47
In addition to the megagovernment bureaucracy of the state’s highway program, there were two additional aspects of progressive thinking that proved significant with regard to transportation. The first was the concept of scientific management developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911. The principles of scientific management were originally designed to promote efficiency in the workplace, but as Taylor was quick to point out, the technique could be applied to the management of any social activity, from business to home to government. At the heart of scientific management was the measurement, quantification, and tabulation of work processes in a well-thought-out scientific manner, along with an analysis of the data collected by a team of technical experts. Through his association with the progressive movement, Taylor’s ideas for the use of technological expertise wherever possible as a means to a better, more progressive society were spread nationwide, and Taylor himself became as popular as Henry Ford.48
The application of scientific management to highway transportation in Connecticut was a natural fit. As early as 1926, the Connecticut Highway Department (in partnership with the federal Office of Road Inquiry, now known as the Bureau of Public Roads) completed its first comprehensive survey of the state’s existing highway system. Wherever possible state engineers applied the techniques of scientific management to the investigation. For instance, the survey included such items as a detailed organizational chart of the Highway Department and its several management bureaus; a year-by-year tally of the state’s increasing motor vehicle registrations in comparison to its total population; an inventory and classification of state highway mileage by type and existing condition; a tabulation of highway revenues and expenditures by town; traffic counts made by field workers at fifty-seven survey stations around the state; and an “O&D” questionnaire given to the traveling public to ascertain the origin and destination of their most frequent trips and the routes they took to get there.49
A third way in which progressive thought impacted the development of the Connecticut highway system was in the area of planning. A logical extension of the principles of scientific management, when applied to highway transportation, was to analyze the years of data collected on various subjects (population, motor vehicle ownership, traffic volumes) so as to recognize trends and to project these trends into future needs. Then, by imposing the projected needs onto the existing highway system, engineers could estimate what if any improvements might be required and how much they might cost. As the survey itself stated, “The establishment of scientific plans of highway development … requires a careful analysis of highway traffic, the trend of its development, and its distribution over the highway system.” In the past, the study noted, highway engineers were handicapped by “the lack of precise knowledge of the character and amount of the traffic using the various roads.” No longer. The very purpose of the survey was “to provide a basis for the scientific planning of highway improvements in Connecticut.”50
The Connecticut Road Survey of 1926 was the first progressive view of