The news last spring that Virginia plans to add two toll
lanes to a 14-mile stretch of the Capital Beltway actually
continues a long tradition in the Old Dominion. More than
300 years ago, in 1772, the Virginia legislature authorized
what was probably the first toll road in America –
a highway over the mountain between Jennings Gap and Warm
Springs in Augusta County. Revenue collected from travelers
was to be used to maintain the road but also “towards
building housing ... for reception of the poor sick resorting
to the said springs.” (See "The History
of Roads in Virginia," Virginia Department of
Transportation.)
In fact, roads such as the Little River Turnpike from
Annandale to Jermantown in northern Virginia or the Blue
Ridge Turnpike (now Rt. 231) from Gordonsville through
Fishers’ Gap to New Market derived their names from
their status as toll roads in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Early toll gates were turnstiles. They were made of two
crossed bars pointed at their outer ends and turned on
a vertical bar or pole -- a pike in the vernacular of
the time.
The turnpike era, in Virginia, which was funded primarily
by private companies, lasted only from the late 18th century
until the Civil War, when many toll roads were taken over
by counties. As the Confederate and Union soldiers destroyed
bridges and roads in the fighting, the private toll system
collapsed. Tolls had never quite covered maintenance or
operating costs, and while the roads were extensive, the
system was financially weak.
Today, Virginia collects tolls on seven different highways
or bridges in northern Virginia, central Virginia and
Hampton Roads. These include the Dulles Toll Road and
Dulles Greenway in Fairfax and Loudoun counties; the Downtown
Expressway and its extensions from Richmond to central
Chesterfield County; the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel;
the George P. Coleman Bridge over the York River; the
Chesapeake Expressway that connects Chesapeake with North
Carolina and the Outer Banks and the Pocahontas Parkway
that connects I-95 in Chesterfield County to I-295 in
Henrico County. (See VDOT
Virginia Toll Facilities.)
Tolls are gathered on close to 100 miles in Virginia.
While this may seem a small percentage of the Commonweath’s
roadways, times could be changing. The newest concept
in traffic control is HOT (high-occupancy toll) lanes.
These are HOV lanes that also carry single drivers, charging
tolls that vary according to driving conditions. For example,
Minnesota launched HOT lanes on a 10-mile stretch of I-394
from the western suburbs to Minneapolis on May 16. The
maximum toll charged, when traffic is heaviest, is $8.
The high-congestion toll doesn’t seem to deter drivers
from buying the electronic tags to use the system. According
to an article in Construction Equipment Guide,
3,000 drivers were prepared to use the lanes when they
opened. (See "Toll
Roads Becoming 'HOT' Funding Topic.")
Speaking of those tags, which now can be seamlessly used
from Virginia to Massachusetts, the technology is actually
more than 30 years old, according to the June 22, 2005
issue of Tollroads News. General Electric developed
the first radio-frequency toll transponder. Buses, staff
vehicles and emergency service vehicles used them first
on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in 1972. They
were mounted under the vehicle and communicated via an
antenna in the pavement. However, the early equipment
was the size of bricks and cost hundreds of dollars. It
wasn’t until the technology became more rugged,
smaller and cheaper that electronic toll systems were
introduced to the public in 1988 and 1989 in Dallas, Tex.,
Norway and Italy almost simultaneously.
In Virginia, today, almost one million drivers have electronic
Smart Tags, the state’s version of the E-Z Pass
used on toll roads in the northeast corridor, reports
the Virginia Department of Transportation. There are 10.5
million electronic toll transactions a month in the state
and 75 percent of all toll transactions are electronic
transactions.
Still, if trends continue and more of the Commonwealth’s
byways become toll roads, we may risk the return of shunpiking.
Shunpiking is the practice of searching out another route
to avoid paying tolls. In fact, a well-known example of
shunpiking occurred here in the 1950s, as a kind of boycott.
When the state bought the privately-run James River Bridge
in eastern Virginia, it increased tolls in 1955. There
was a public outcry from both private drivers and businesses,
due to no visible improvements in the road. The head of
the Smithfield Packing Company, producer of Virginia’s
famous hams, ordered his trucks to take a different route
and cross the river at a cheaper facility.
Tolls, however, remained on the bridge until 1975. (See
Wikipedia, "Toll
Roads.") So, we may have come full circle as
private companies, some as far away as Australia and Ireland,
now vie for the right to collect the bounty from HOT lanes
and other tolls from the Capital Beltway in northern Virginia
to the Pocahontas Parkway that links Chesterfield and
eastern Henrico counties. Is a return to shunpiking far
beyond?
July 25, 2005
Nice & Curious
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Last Modified:
Friday, June 27, 2008
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