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The Importance of Being Earmarked: Transport Policy and Highway Finance in Great Britain and the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

James A. Dunn Jr
James A. Dunn Jr
Affiliation:
University of Missouri—Kansas City
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Extract

In the spring of 1907, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Herbert Asquith, was asked in Parliament for his opinion on taxing the growing number of private automobiles in Great Britain. Such a measure, Asquith replied, would be an ‘almost ideal tax, because it is a tax on a luxury which is apt to degenerate into a nuisance’. This remark was typical of the British upper-class attitude toward the motor car in theearly decades of this century: it was unlikely that the automobile would become widely owned by the middle classes, and unthinkable that it could be owned by the lower classes. Such motoring as was to be done by men of humble station would be as chauffeurs and lorry drivers. The wealthy would continue to use their new self-propelled playthings for weekend pleasure trips in the country.

Type
Law and Legislation
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 29 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1978

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References

The author expresses his gratitude to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and to the Graduate Research Council of the University of Missouri—Kansas City for financial assistance in the research and writing of this article.

1 Britain, Great, Parliament, Parliamentary Debates, 4th series (April 18, 1907), col. 1197,Google Scholar cited in Plowden, William, The Motor Car and Politics in Britain (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 73.Google Scholar

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6 Ibid., p. 423.

7 For example, he writes that, ‘in some cases it probably matters very little whether a particular enterprise is publicly owned or not. The commercial banks in France … function exactly now as they did before nationalization, the French government making something of a virtue of the fact.’ Ibid., p. 295.

8 Beatrice, and Webb, Sidney, The Story of the King's Highway (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1963), p. 238.Google Scholar

9 Britain, Great, Parliament, Parliamentary Debates, 5th series, vol. 4 (1909), p. 601,Google Scholar cited in Plowden, , The Motor Car, p. 79. Much of the material on the history and finance of British roads before the Second World War has been taken from Plowden's excellent book. Other data on this period and the postwar era as well have been drawn from the booklet published annually by the British Road Federation, Basic Road Statistics, which contains not only a wealth of statistics but also a great deal of information on the legal and organizational history of the British road system.Google Scholar

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11 Gibb had been the General Manager of the North-Eastern Railroad and Chairman of the Underground Electric Railways Co., Ibid., p. 84.

12 Ibid., pp. 100–01.

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15 In 1931 a report of the National Expenditure Committee decried the ‘heavy outlay on what we have termed “amenity development” largely serving the needs of pleasure traffic insofar as it is required at all…. The committee went on to remark that the Road Fund had become little more than a ‘convenient means of financing grandiose projects without the inconvenience of obtaining Parliamentary approval and providing for the cost in the annual budget’. Great Britain, Report of the National Expenditure Committee (London: HMSO 1931, Cmd. 3920), p. 296.Google Scholar

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21 Aldcroft, , op. cit., p. 260.Google Scholar

22 John B. Rae paints a vivid portrait of the state of American roads in the early years of the twentieth century. He also discusses the bicyclist origins of the good roads movement. The Road and the Car, pp. 23–29.Google Scholar

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24 Data on the growth of automobile registrations and the length of paved road are from ibid., pp. 23, 119.

25 Ibid., p. 56.

26 Ibid., p. 87.

27 For a discussion of the difficulties involved in breaking state highway trust funds see Salaman, Drew, ‘Towards Balanced Urban Transportation: Reform of the State Highway Trust Funds’, Urban Lawyer, 4 (Winter, 1972), pp. 77–87.Google Scholar

28 U.S. Department of Transportation, 1974 National Transportation Report: Current Performance and Future Prospects (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975). p. 470.Google Scholar

29 48 stat. 993.

30 Rae gives details of the evolution of federal legislation, The Road and the Car, pp. 38–9.Google Scholar Federal highway aid figures and data on the federal gasoline tax are taken from Highway Statistics: Summary to 1965, pp. 168–9.Google Scholar

31 Rae, , The Road and the Car, 185–90.Google Scholar

32 Highway Statistics: Summary to 1965, p. 23.Google Scholar

33 Rae, , The Road and the Car, pp. 173–83.Google Scholar

34 An analysis of the politics of the Interstate Highway decision of 1956 can be found in Davies, Richard O., The Age of Asphalt: The Automobile, the Freeway, and the Condition of Metropolitan America (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, Co., 1975), pp. 16–27,Google Scholar and in Rose, Mark H., Express Highway Politics 1939–1956 (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1973).Google Scholar

35 Davies, , Age of Asphalt, p. 22.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., p. 23.

37 Hanson, Daniel J. Sr., ‘The Highway Trust Fund is Needed’, Public Works (February, 1976), p. 74.Google Scholar

38 70 Stat. 374, and 70 Stat. 387.

39 Davies, . Age of Asphalt, p. 22.Google Scholar

40 Figures on the distribution of the Highway Trust Fund revenue are from Highway Statistics: Summary to 1965, p. 169,Google Scholar and from 1974 National Transportation Report, p. 293.Google Scholar

41 See Mowbray, A. Q., Road to Ruin (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1969), pp. 7–21.Google Scholar

42 Congressional Quarterly, ‘Impoundment Suits’, C.Q. Almanac 1973 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1974), p. 253.Google Scholar

43 The critical literature on the car and the city is too vast to cite here. An early critic of the way in which ‘we have sold our urban birthright for a sorry mess of motor cars’, was Lewis Mumford. See his The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1961), pp. 500–20.Google Scholar One of the most recent critical studies is Flink, James J., The Car Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1975).Google Scholar

44 Again, the freeway revolt literature is vast. Boston alone has generated a small library. See, for example, Lupo, Alan, Colcord, Frank, and Fowler, Edmund P., Rites of Way: The Politics of Transportation in Boston and the U.S. City (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971),Google Scholar and Sloan, Allan K., Citizen Participation in Transportation Planning: The Boston Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1974).Google Scholar

45 Details on the pro-transit coalition may be found in William Lilley, III, ‘Urban Report: Urban Interests Win Transit Bill with “Letter-Perfect” Lobbying’, National Journal (September 19, 1970), 2021–9,Google Scholar and in Congressional Quarterly, ‘Movement Began in Late 1960s to Modify Trust Fund’, C.Q. Almanac 1975 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1976), p. 736.Google Scholar

46 For a discussion of the politics of ‘breaking’ the Federal Highway Trust Fund and the details of the complicated arrangements that allow some of the trust fund money to be used for transit see Smerk, George M., Urban Mass Transportation: A Dozen Years of Federal Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), pp. 72–89.Google Scholar

47 Congressional Quarterly, ‘Highway Extension Sent to Conference’, C.Q. Almanac 1975 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1976), p. 735.Google Scholar

48 Ibid.

49 Plowden, , The Motor Car, pp. 399–400.Google Scholar