The bicycle craze of the 1880s and 1890s left two important legacies, one technological, the other social. The technology of the bicycle included much that would prove useful to makers of the automobile (and later the airplane), including advanced metallurgy, improved ball and roller bearings, variable speed transmissions, shaft drive, pneumatic tires, and certain techniques for the mass production of precision parts. Whereas their French and British counterparts were responsible for inventing the boneshaker velocipede, ordinary, and safety bicycles, American inventors made significant contributions to “the development of tools for affordable mass production,” such as improved lathes for wheel and frame manufacturing. And, of course, it was American industrialist Albert Pope who showed the world how to sell bicycles—and the related culture of bicycle touring.
The social legacy of bicycle touring introduced the public to the reading of road maps, the need for route signing, and the possibility of long-distance touring, complete with tour books and discounted lodging, all of which would later become essential elements of auto travel. In addition, the bicycle promoted the need for good roads between towns and in the process turned the idea of roads improved for all-weather, long-distance travel from a low-priority government activity, historically carried out in haphazard fashion by individual towns, into a public right whose time had finally come. As a result of the efforts of Albert Pope, the LAW, and other cycling advocates, the struggle for good roads became a national political issue, and for the first time in American history agencies were created in our national and state governments to promote and provide for adequate roads.
Most importantly, bicycle touring encouraged the desire for independent travel long before the advent of the horseless carriage. So powerful was this contribution to the public consciousness that one Pope engineer believed it was the bicycle that “directed men’s minds to the possibilities of independent, long-distance travel over the ordinary highway. We thought the railroad was good enough.”26 But though people had lived for half a century with the omnipresence of mass transportation via the railroad, “the bicycle created a new demand which it was beyond the ability of the railroad to supply. Then it came about that the bicycle could not satisfy the demand, which it had created. A mechanically propelled vehicle was wanted instead of a foot-propelled one.”27 The unprecedented craze of bicycle riding and touring in the 1880s and 1890s had created the desire for the automobile years before the horseless carriage itself appeared.
Ultimately, it was automobility—the interconnected system of automotive technology (vehicle, engine, and fuel) together with the smooth running surface of paved highways—that made high-speed, door-to-door travel possible year round. And it was automobility (the vehicle plus the infrastructure over which it would operate, not one or the other alone) that would radically alter the course of Connecticut history, have a significant impact on the landscape through the redistribution of the state’s population, and have an adverse effect on the state’s established system of railroad and steamboat transportation—as we shall see in the first chapter. It was also automobility that by the climax of this story in the 1960s would make visible to the general populace the dangers to the natural environment—from air, noise, and water pollution, traffic congestion, and suburban sprawl—inherent in automobility itself. This conundrum of technology (if some is good, why isn’t more even better) would make visible the limitations of all technology and strike at the heart of America’s long-held belief in growth through technological progress, so proudly exhibited for all the world to see at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia.
Chapter One The Early Auto Age
In 1895, Connecticut created it first Highway Commission, which was to become the third state highway agency in the nation after those of New Jersey and Massachusetts. Over the next forty years, the one-man office of the Connecticut Highway Commission evolved into the bureaucracy of the Connecticut Highway Department (CHD) using public funds to transform a network of nineteenth-century earthen turnpikes into a trunk line system of modern paved highways to satisfy the demands of the automobile, truck, and motor bus. In the process, the CHD became the most powerful agency of state government. Between 1916 and 1921, the national government in Washington likewise began to use public tax dollars to build the nation’s first network of two-lane interstate highways. This was accomplished by creating a megagovernment partnership with state highway departments around the country. The partnership relied on such state departments to construct the federal system, thereby adding to the power and influence of these agencies. Meanwhile, Connecticut’s existing system of steamboats, railroads, and electric street railways, consolidated and operated under the corporate structure of the New Haven Railroad, floundered under the burdens of heavy debt incurred by Morgan and Mellen during their attempt to create a New England transportation monopoly in the 1910s, and under antitrust regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission. By 1935, as the early auto age ended, Connecticut had completed a three-tiered system of modern highways—federal, state, and town—that used public money to promote automobility at the expense of privately owned mass transportation, and as a result transformed the relationship between Connecticut cities and the rural towns that surrounded them. That same year, with revenues declining heavily and unable to cover the interest on its long-term debt, the New Haven Railroad filed for bankruptcy.
Paving the Way
In the first decades of the twentieth century, state and federal governments created a highway network based on a hierarchy of road types and funding responsibilities that continues to this day.
TOWARD A STATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM
Ever since Connecticut’s earliest days as an English colony, the construction and maintenance of all highways had been the responsibility of individual towns. In the English tradition, the task was accomplished through the use of statute labor, whereby men of a certain age were required by law to work a specified number of days each year on building and repairing the roads in their town. As might be expected, improvements were at best uneven, and at worse nonexistent. Following the Revolution, the responsibility for improving and maintaining major highways in Connecticut was given to privately owned turnpike companies, chartered by the state, who for their efforts were allowed to collect tolls from passing travelers. While this method fostered travel by stagecoach, which helped to stitch the newly independent colonies into an economic whole, it too proved problematic. Such was the ongoing cost of maintenance that some 90 percent of Connecticut turnpike corporations failed to earn enough income to provide their investors with any significant return on their investment. Therefore, as the nineteenth century wore on, companies found ways to abandon their unprofitable routes, after which responsibility for the roadway reverted back to the local community. The last privately owned turnpike in Connecticut, the Derby Turnpike into New Haven, returned to public use on February 9, 1897, after nearly one hundred years in private hands, precisely because it had been one of the few profitable toll roads in Connecticut.1
With all highways in the state back in public hands, the legislature went about formulating a statewide program to improve Connecticut roads. To gauge the scope of the work to be done, the legislature appointed a committee of nine men—one state senator together with one representative from each of the state’s eight counties—to