3 - “A Wilderness of Turnpike Gates”

Summary

During the privatization craze of the 1980s, libertarians advocated toll roads as the cure for America’s “crumbling infrastructure” problem. As Gerald Gunderson writes in “Privatization and the 19th-Century Turnpike,” Americans invented an “ingenious” market mechanism for supplying its road deficit: the public–private partnership. However, as libertarian commentator Timothy B. Lee concedes: “Roads are deeply intertwined with governments. They always have been and as far as I can see they always will be. This means that theyll never be truly private in the sense that other private companies like restaurants or shoe factories can be.” Chapter 3 illustrates Lee’s insight and argues that highways and roads were a defining feature of “publicness” in the American antebellum experience. Although turnpikes were organized as private businesses and charged tolls in order to recoup considerable investment and turn a profit, in the end they could really not be operated as private businesses: they were inherently political undertakings that required the participation of legislatures, courts, investors, and the general public. Moreover, turnpikes were built in a field of political contestation in which Americans often resisted the privatization of customary public spaces.