PUBLIC CORPORATIONS
Sig,—The point that Mr. Hobson wished to make in his article on Public Corporations, whether sound or not, is not helped by his choice of the old Turnpike Trusts as illustration, since his impression of the nature and circumstances of these bodies would appear to be somewhat erroneous.
The Turnpike Trusts were not formed to "maintain," still less to " establish " a " grid " of highways: nor was it a reversal of policy hand the roads back to the parish authorities when the Trust system began to be abolished. The Trust was a temporary expedient for putting a comparatively short stretch of highway back into repair after it had got beyond the power of the parish authority to cope with. The assump- tion behind it was that once the road had been put into proper order— with the aid of a capital sum raised on the security of, and repaid by, the tolls authorised in the constituting Act—maintenance would then be practicable by the parish out of its ordinary resources in Statute Labour, commutation and rates.
Sometimes, in the earlier days, the Trusts expired as contempltted and the highways reverted to parish management. But the more usual happening was for an expiring Trust to plead for a renewed term on the ground that its work had not yet reached that stage when the parish could take over again, and after a time repeated renewal became practically universal—because all the efforts of ignorant and usually corrupt management could not overtake the ever-increasing wear and tear to which rapidly expanding traffic subjected the roads.
The blocking up of byroads, &c., was not to compel travellers to use the toll road, but to prevent them from using the toll road and dodging the toll bars or gates! Nor were the increases in the amount of the tolls, nor the endless and irksome restrictions placed on weight, wheel width, &c., monopolistic restrictions: until McAdam showed them how, the incompetent surveyors simply did not know how to make road surfaces that would stand up to the heavier and heavier traffic that was growing up and they naturally sought to make the traffic fit the roads.
Ignorance, graft and incompetence were the main causes of the "diffi- culties" in which most Trusts found themselves—plus the lack of any kind of central supervision, financial or technical. Both the highways and the Trusts had greatly improved for years before the railways came and, by taking their traffic, deprived them of most of their income, and there can be little doubt that but for that crucial turning-point in the history of locomotion the Trusts would have been made efficient bodies—
or superseded by some other system under which the unpopular toll system was done away with. The final fate of the Turnpikes was not due to any faults they may have retained, nor was it any inherent defect in the system that caused then' to be "swept away ";—it was simply the result of railway competition.
The story of the Turnpike Trusts therefore, does not seem to contain any lesson of value today in connexion with public corporations.—Yours
Previous page
