early as 1890. Other States, notably New York, California, Maryland, and Connecticut, soon followed the lead of Massachusetts, and State borrowing began a long period of steady increase.
The gas station represents the major source of highway financial income today. Will it be able to support future highway construction and maintenance?
Before 1914, county and local road bonds were concentrated in a relatively few States, exceeding $10 million in only seven: Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, California, New Jersey, and Tennessee.
State Aid for Roadbuilding
State participation in the financing of road construction was an accomplished fact before the motor vehicle became a practical means of transportation. It began with a law enacted in New Jersey in 1891 providing for the appointment of Township Committees to inspect the roads in their townships annually and to develop a systematic improvement plan for them. The committees were empowered to employ engineers or other competent persons as consultants and to prepare plans and estimates. The financing plan obligated the State to pay one-third of the cost of improvements; adjacent property owners, one-tenth; and the county in which the improvement was made, the remaining 57 percent. To the county belonged the responsibility for road maintenance.
Middlesex County, the first to take advantage of the new plan, borrowed some $50,000 to $60,000 to pay the cost of three projects totaling nearly 11 miles. On December 27, 1892, the State paid its share of the construction cost, almost $21,000, “the first money paid by the State of New Jersey for improved roadways.”[1]
The State aid idea caught on rapidly, and, by the close of 1917, all 48 States had enacted such laws, though the patterns of aid varied widely from State to State, some at first providing only advice to the localities.
With the spread of State aid came the development of State highway systems. The first such system was established in Massachusetts in 1893 and the last in Mississippi in 1924. In the early days, State laws granted varying degrees of State control over these systems: Some States had none at all; others had full responsibility for them.
The highway-user tax, which was to become the great provider for large-scale highway development in this country, appeared inconspicuously, first in New York in 1901 with a registration fee of $1.00 per vehicle for regulatory purposes. In 1906, New Jersey established an annual license fee classified on the basis of vehicle horsepower. The rate was $3.00 for vehicles of less than 30 HP and $5.00 for those of 30 or more. The next year, Connecticut provided for a more steeply graduated scale of charges.
Thus, the user charge was in existence at the beginning of this century but not exploited as a source of significant amounts of revenue for highways. Its role as part of a system of motor-vehicle imposts dedicated to furnishing a consistent, dependable flow of revenue for long-term highway financing was not foreseen at this stage of highway development.
- ↑ Early History in American Road Building, AASHO—The First Fifty Years, 1914–1964 (American Association of State Highway Officials, Washington, D.C., 1965) p. 32.
