FDR actually did propose a series of turnpikes but the head of Federal Highway Administration said that no one would want to pay tolls and by the time Pennsylvania Turnpike proved a success it was late October 1940 and FDR had other uses of the materials and manpower.
"Stop, pay troll!"
Shevek shudders!
I used to live in North Wales Pennsylvania just north of Philadelphia in my families in Columbus Ohio and Fort Wayne Indiana I have driven that road so much I had flashbacks posting this however one of the best roads to drive.
OK, I viscerally hate the idea of a toll Interstate; to me toll roads are just plain unAmerican.
That said, I could conjure up some Devil's Advocate arguments for them.
Now obviously I've had the privilege of living in places where tolls are largely unknown; I do understand some of y'all live where they are more or less normal, I just never had the experience.
So first of all,
@fscott, what exactly is good about the toll highway?
I might guess, fewer trucks. Certainly my counterexperience of free access freeways like the I-5 suggest that if I could afford the tolls, I might be grateful for fewer damn trucks, especially if the goods were moving on railroads instead. Perhaps I should be grateful to the self-named "knights of the road", the truckers, because without the game of trying to pass them safely in their endless battle array, I might fall asleep on a road like the I-5 between the Tehachapi mountains and the northern ranges along the California-Oregon border; between Bakersfield and Redding, the I-5 lies practically arrow straight and is dull terrain to drive through indeed. With these modern cars that can steer to stay in lane and cruise control with collision alarms, a driver might indeed fall asleep, hypnotized by the sheer abstract sameness of it all. Of course few highways have the luxury of such Roman idealization as that stretch of the 5. Anyway the trucks certainly make the game interesting in a Chinese sense, and also break up the monotone landscape with a streak of industrial butt-ugliness.
But by and large, despite the damned monster trucks, having roads that demand tolls and thus must employ an army of ill-paid bureaucrats to stand guard and demand the payment, the sheer hassle of having to keep loose change handy to feed the toll monster, and the frequent stops in the free flow of traffic they might cause depending on the setup all just seems so contrary to the spirit of the New Deal age or the self-congratulatory nature of post-War US society. The Devil's Advocate in me suggests maybe this would be a good thing.
Part of my revulsion against toll roads is that I remember reading not long after Bush the Elder was elected in 1988 that the future held in store more toll roads, because advisors to Bush were advocating them, and this in the context of 1980s Thatcher-Reaganite privatization. The idea of the superhighways demanding tolls to use them strikes me as bad enough, but here the idea was to sell rights to charge tolls to some private corporation, who would be obliged to keep the roads up (as they saw fit) but would be motivated by the prospect of profits far beyond the necessary costs. Such a scheme would have been yet another engine to enrich the already rich on the backs of the working poor. If we are going to have toll roads surely an accountable government authority should own them in the name of the people, and be subject to public democratic processes to account for the rates they are charging.
Anyway the gasoline tax to pay for all roads and having those roads be communistically open to all who choose to use them (having paid toll at the pump) seems workable enough.
So, was this notion of Interstates=toll road an unnecessary diversion of the thread, or is there something inherent about demanding tolls for such roads in the period? I am pretty amazed to learn it was Warren in the '40s who first thought of gasoline taxes; I'd think that idea would have cropped up in statehouses all over the nation by the mid-1920s at the latest, for state road systems. It does raise the question in my mind, how were roads paid for before the automotive revolution? Then of course they could be and often were far simpler, dirt tracks being generally good enough for carts and carriages of the type that would have moved on them. I know that in early 19th century pioneer days in the Midwest, roads were often "corduroy" which is to say, paved by wooden planks, that weren't very even to begin with and quickly got out of alignment, tipping up here, down there, going askew, and becoming pretty terrible for carts to move over, let alone anything faster. And that the Federalists and Whigs favored "interior improvements" including road projects, and these were indeed generally turnpikes--though I can't see how access was effectively limited.
Superhighways on the other hand are broadly defined as "Limited Access;" this is the secret of their success, that cross traffic must go on overpasses or underpasses, that they are fenced off to prevent casual wandering on of local herds of animals or children; this is what permits traffic to flow unimpeded. Given limited access, then it is only necessary to police the on-ramps and off ramps. If a single fee were charged to enter, and no second one had to paid until someone got off, and then wanted back on again, that fee might be quite large, calibrated to someone planning to take very long drives, of an hour or more. Eventually every vehicle would be forced off the turnpike to refuel, which would also be an opportunity to take a general break, so if the fees were set around typical tank ranges then people would generally be encouraged to use other roads (the term used in the parts of the USA I know is generally "surface roads," don't know if that is universal or not) for more local and casual uses, and only use the Interstate for long range trips. In turn planners would try to avoid running the roads through major urban areas, and the sort of sprawl we find OTL where every exit turns into a casual extension of the nearest town would be checked--indeed every exit is an opportunity for a roadside service station or three, but not so much casual little mini-malls, geared to servicing the town it is near, because a short run down the Interstate would be uneconomical. Nor would they serve any but the richest commuters because of the high tolls, thus local traffic being limited, the lanes could be kept to a minimum 2 each way geared to the flow of people and trucks hauling goods a long way.
As such I suspect that that sort of plan would not meet with high popular approval in America; people are not going to want the barrier the road makes if they can't use it casually for short local spins. The sheer hassle of having to hand over change to enter the system seems like it would stir up some resentment. Perhaps the pressure would be on to do something like I've read the plan was for the US 101 passing through Santa Rosa CA--the idea was to provide no on ramps in town, and to dig out a deep tunnel for the lanes of the road to go through with no option to enter or exit until it got to the other side. People who were taking the 101
to Santa Rosa would exit to the surface version, above the superhighway part, which would be a stop and start limited speed boulevard, as the road approached the town from north or south, and those who were driving through would stay on the subterranean superhighway which would emerge to the surface on the other side of town. Obviously it would have been expensive to bury the highway like that, but insofar as two lanes that have no reason to stop or slow to accommodate entering traffic or prepare to exit might serve to handle very large volumes with no further expansion the investment might pay off handsomely, even granting that maintenance might be tricky, and in earthquake country (the infamous one leveling San Francisco early in the 20th century actually had its epicenter pretty much in Santa Rosa, which was literally leveled) good engineering would be especially challenging. If this were the nature of the Interstates--no entrances or exits within major cities at all, running mainly through tunnels out of sight and out of mind--their existence as toll roads might be better tolerated as unobtrusive to those who don't choose to pay to use them. But politically speaking, the "free" access versions, so that in my mind Interstate="freeway," seem better poised to cement themselves to public consensus despite the evils eventually associated with them. Allowing cities to reform around them seems to have brought some serious problems, but by the time these are recognized by the general public, charging new fees to use them is clearly a case of adding both injury and insult to injury. In early days, when they are first being laid out and approved, they looked like big win wins to the general public who therefore supported them.
Thus, I suspect if we are going to talk about early Interstates in the USA, particularly in the New Deal days, we are going to be talking about freeways, not toll roads.