There are many private highways in the United States.
The Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike, begun in 1792 between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Lancaster, Pennsylvania was the first major American turnpike. According to Gerald Gunderson's Privatization and the 19th-Century Turnpike, "In the first three decades of the 19th century Americans built more than 10,000 miles of turnpikes, mostly in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. Relative to the economy at that time, this effort exceeded the post-World War II interstate highway system that present-day Americans assume had to be primarily planned and financed by the federal government". Because electronics did not exist in that era, all tolls had to be collected by human cashiers at toll booths, creating high fixed costs that could only be covered by a large volume of traffic. As railroads and steamboats began to compete with the turnpikes, the companies started to shut down their less profitable routes or turn them over to governments. (See Category:Pre-freeway turnpikes in the United States for a listing.)
The National Bridge Inventory lists roughly 2,200 privately owned highway bridges in 41 states and Puerto Rico.
Read more about Private Highways In The United States: Indiana Toll Road, Reedy Creek Improvement District, Dalton Highway, California, Dulles Greenway, Texas, Illinois, Colorado, Toll Roads To Serve Development
Famous quotes containing the words united states, private, highways, united and/or states:
“So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“Lisa Fremont: Surprise is the most important element of attack. And besides, you’re not up on your private eye literature. When they’re in trouble it’s always their girl Friday who gets them out of it.
L.B. Jeffries: Well, is she the girl who saves him from the clutches of the seductive show girls and the over passionate daughters of the rich?
Lisa Fremont: The same.
L.B. Jeffries: That’s the one, huh? But he never ends up marrying her, does he? That’s strange.”
—John Michael Hayes (b. 1919)
“That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)
“What makes the United States government, on the whole, more tolerable—I mean for us lucky white men—is the fact that there is so much less of government with us.... But in Canada you are reminded of the government every day. It parades itself before you. It is not content to be the servant, but will be the master; and every day it goes out to the Plains of Abraham or to the Champs de Mars and exhibits itself and toots.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)