Paved Roads & Public Money. Richard DeLuca

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      Pope’s Good Roads petition of 1893 to Congress is stored in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

       Courtesy of the National Archives

      As the name implied, the main role of the ORI was educational, and it fulfilled its mission in two ways: by collecting and disseminating information on how to build good roads to towns and cities across the nation, and by building short segments of “object lesson” roads in select cities, including Pope’s hometown of Boston, to demonstrate what a good road could be like and thereby whet local appetites for the construction of additional good-road mileage. While the ORI had no funds to build a continuous network of good roads (that degree of federal support would have to wait two more decades), the ORI did become a permanent institutional presence within the federal government and as such soon replaced the LAW as the nation’s most vocal advocate for road improvement.

      As might be expected, the good roads movement led by Pope, the LAW, and other advocates had its impact on state governments, first in New Jersey and Massachusetts, where the nation’s first two state highway commissions were established in 1891 and 1893, respectively, to address the ongoing issue of improved roadbuilding. In Connecticut, the momentum for good roads legislation peaked in the winter of 1894–95, as farmers from the state’s 122 Grange chapters at their annual meeting passed a resolution supporting legislation to provide for good roads throughout the state, and vowed their “continued agitation” until such action was taken.²⁴ Meanwhile, the Hartford Courant published articles on good-road activities in other states, thereby keeping the issue alive in the consciousness of the state’s citizens and their elected representatives. In June 1895, the Connecticut Legislature created the state’s first Highway Commission (and the nation’s third). At the beginning, the Connecticut Highway Commission was comprised of a three-man board of commissioners, with James H. MacDonald its first chairman. Two years later, in an effort to centralize responsibility for roadbuilding even further, the legislature revised the structure of the commission, reducing it to a single commissioner, James H. MacDonald, who alone was now responsible for implementing a highway improvement program for Connecticut. As we shall see, it was through MacDonald’s efforts as highway commissioner over nearly two decades that the Connecticut Highway Department was eventually organized in 1913, along with a statewide network of paved trunk line highways for which the department was responsible.²⁵

      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.