PODCASTS

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Two of the topics discussed on this blog—the need for tolls and the impact of transportation on the natural environment as the story of our time—are discussed more fully in separate one-hour podcasts that can be accessed through this blog page. Both were produced with the help of Walter Woodward, State Historian of Connecticut and Professor of History at UConn, as part of his own podcast series Grating the Nutmeg. My thanks to Walter for his continued support of my work on the history of Connecticut transportation.

  1. Why We Need Tolls recorded in the summer of 2019.
  2. Transportation Tells The Story of Our Time recorded March 2021.
  3. Amazing Tales From Off and On Connecticut’s Beaten Path

TRANSPORTATION & ZONING REFORM

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Transportation is the connection between a people and the land they inhabit. It makes possible a myriad of economic and social interactions. In return, the land (by which I mean the number of people, how they are distributed on the landscape and how they use the land to maintain themselves and their community) influences both the amount of transportation needed to move people and goods effectively, as well as the location of specific transportation corridors. As it happens there is an issue in news recently the outcome of which could influence the state’s transportation needs far into the future, though the issue is not what one might immediately think of as a transportation problem. At issue is a movement to reform local zoning laws that is gaining momentum across Connecticut and even nationally. 

Though once a mainly agricultural state, with a population spread out thinly across the landscape, after the industrial revolution took hold in the nineteenth century, Connecticut became a highly industrialized state, whose increasing population settled near factory jobs in a number of dense and dirty urban centers scattered over the state. In the sixty-year period from 1860 to 1920, the population of the state grew three-fold, from 460,000 to 1,380,000. By 1920, a full one-third of the state’s total population lived in its three largest cities: New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford. As a way to organize the growing chaos of city living, Hartford created the nation’s first City Planning Commission in 1907, and other Connecticut cities soon followed suit, New Haven in 1910, Bridgeport in 1913 and New Britain in 1915. One of the long-lasting contributions of city planning was the concept of organizing land according to how it is used, or zoning. Zoning typically restricted each parcel of land in a community to a specific type of use—residential, commercial or industrial—while establishing building lines and height limits to control the size and location of structures on each building lot. Though challenged at first, the courts considered zoning a legitimate expression of a community’s policing powers, as long as it was applied without prejudice to the entire community. 

The Connecticut legislature endorsed zoning for specific Connecticut cities beginning in 1921, and four year later passed general legislation that empowered all Connecticut cities and towns to create zoning agencies to control the bulk and use of structures in their communities, as well as the density of their population. But it turned out that residential zoning, in particular, had a dark side. By specifying the size and geographic location of single-family residential lots, towns influenced the price of houses built on such lots and thereby created neighborhoods of single-family homes economically out of reach for Connecticut’s minority populations. To make matters worse, federal housing and urban renewal policies enacted after WW II were blatantly racist. Low-cost, 30-year mortgages from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) made the movement of white city dwellers to the suburbs possible, while at the same time denying the benefits of the program to those who lived in portions of cities the FHA considered undesirable, a practice known as redlining. As a result, the FHA “exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy.” Together exclusionary zoning and urban redlining helped to create the city slums and economically segregated suburbs so common in Connecticut.

Today, a group of concerned citizens called Desegregate Connecticut is hoping to reverse this inequitable situation by promoting the reform of local zoning laws. Earlier this year, the group published the Connecticut Zoning Atlas, a compendium of the laws and regulations of over 2600 zoning districts across the state. The atlas indicates that of the three million zoned acres in Connecticut, more than 90% is zoned for single-family homes where no special permission is required for construction. By comparison only two percent of zoned land allows for multi-family housing of four or more units. (Eight Connecticut towns do not allow multi-family housing of any kind.)

Recently, a group of Yale Law School students and civil rights attorneys filed an application with the town of Woodbridge to build a four-unit house on a parcel of land zoned for single-family use. The petition is intended as a test case to increase the number of multi-family, low-income housing units that can be built in towns where exclusionary zoning now makes decisions of that kind subject to special approval by the local planning board. A decision on the matter is expected at the board’s next meeting on May 24th. 

While this zoning matter might not seem transportation related, it is. A decision in the Woodbridge case that ultimately makes it easier for contractors to build multi-family low-income housing in suburban towns around the state would allow town planners to strategically cluster higher-density development in certain transportation corridors, where an increase in transit use would help decrease our dependency on the automobile for personal transportation. The difficulty of sustaining mass transportation routes in certain parts of the state is intricately linked to the scattering of population across the landscape as a result of the large-acreage, low-density single-family zoning so prevalent in Connecticut. 

WHY WE NEED TOLLS

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How did we get here?

Recognizing that “transportation is the backbone of our economy,” in February of 2015, Governor Malloy presented to the Legislature a report called LET’S GO CT prepared by the Connecticut Department of Transportation. LET’S GO CT was a bold 30-year plan for improving each of the state’s multi-modal transportation systems—highways and bridges, rail and bus, air and water. The itemized improvements were estimated to cost a staggering $100 billion over the next 30 years. Of that total, two-thirds, or $66 billion, was needed simply to maintain the existing system, while the remaining $34 billion would be used to expand the capacity of the system to accommodate growth in population, commerce and travel demand. 

Next, the Governor appointed a panel of legislative and business leaders to recommend strategies for funding the improvements included in LET’S GO CT. The Finance Panel reported their findings in January 2016. They included recommendations for new sources of revenue necessary to keep the state’s Special Transportation Fund (STF) solvent for the next fifteen years. At the core of their recommendations were proposals to return the gas tax to the level of the 1990s, when it was 39¢ per gallon, and to implement electronic tolling to help pay specifically for improvements in two of the state’s major travel corridors: along the shoreline route from New York to Rhode Island, and through the center of the state from New Haven to Hartford and Springfield. The Panel also insisted that the new revenues, always a temptation for legislators looking to balance a much larger state budget, be used only for transportation improvements, and to this end recommended a constitutional amendment to protect all transportation revenues. 

A history of tolls in Connecticut

Tolls have been used to pay for transportation improvements in Connecticut since colonial times and the early days of nationhood, beginning with ferries in the 1630s, bridges in the 1760s, and highways in the 1790s. Tolls were seen then, as now, as the fairest way to fund any transportation project since only those individuals who use a given facility, damage it and over time require it to be repaired or replaced, are made to pay for it.

Beginning in 1907, the state’s system of modern, two lane highways was funded not by the collection of highway tolls, but rather by fees paid to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to register each vehicle and license its driver. In 1921 a gasoline tax was added (2¢ per gallon) to raise additional monies. The rapid growth of automobile ownership and gasoline consumption during the first decades of the century allowed the Connecticut Highway Department to convert the state’s network of dirt roads to one of nearly 2500 paved miles using these two motor vehicle taxes alone. Up to 1923, toll revenue was still used to build many of the state’s modern highway bridges. In that year, however, tolls were removed from all highway bridges in Connecticut, and from then on through the 1930s state highways and bridges were improved solely from revenue raised through DMV fees and gasoline taxes.

With the construction of the Merritt Parkway, the state returned to collecting tolls to pay for this expensive new kind of limited access highway. Tollbooths were first erected in the late 1930s and early 1940s on the Merritt and Wilbur Cross parkways, and again in the early 1950s to pay for the Connecticut Turnpike, which was built by the state before the federal government began to fund the interstate system. With passage of the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, the portion of the Connecticut Turnpike from Greenwich to Waterford paid for with state funds was transferred to the federal interstate system as I-95, and the tolls were allowed to remain. High-level bridges along the route, including the Baldwin Bridge over the Connecticut River and the Gold Star Memorial Bridge over the Thames River, were also built and maintained with the collection of tolls.

In the mid 1980s, as final payments on the bonds that built the Connecticut Turnpike were about to be made, residents along the route lobbied the Legislature to remove all tolls from I-95. A fiery accident in January of 1986, in which several persons were killed while stopped at one of the turnpike toll stations, brought the matter to a head. As a result, the Legislature decided to remove all tollbooths not just from I-95, but from the Merritt and Wilbur Cross parkways, and all existing toll bridges in the state as well. By the end of the 1980s, for the second time in the state’s history, Connecticut was again a toll free state. 

To compensate for the loss of toll revenue, the legislature raised the state gas tax dramatically over the next few years, from 25¢ to 39¢ per gallon. The increase in gas taxes soon became a political football, and by the late 1990s, the state acquiesced to public pressure, and reduced the gas tax by 14¢ a gallon, without replacing the income needed to fund the state’s ongoing transportation commitments. As a result, projects scheduled for the early 2000s were cancelled or postponed. Commenting on the high cost of ConnDOT’s 2015 LET’S GO CT plan the Finance Panel noted: “if the gas tax had not been reduced, the Special Transportation Fund (STF) would have been able to execute on hundreds of projects that are now part of Connecticut’s backlog, and the price tag for LET’S GO CT would be significantly lower.” Reinstating tolls on Connecticut major highways is an attempt to replace the gas tax revenues lost in the 1990s.

What is the real problem? 

Connecticut has been in an ongoing budget crunch since the 1970s, due largely to the increasing cost of social programs (education, welfare and health care) that originated in the 1960s. One tack taken by legislators over the years to balance these budget shortfalls was to use funds dedicated to transportation improvements for non-transportation uses. In 1975, the legislature dissolved the existing transportation fund completely and placed all transportation monies into the General Fund instead. Transportation projects then had to compete with social programs for funding, and many projects and much maintenance was deferred as a result, which led to the deadly collapse of the Mianus River Bridge in 1986. Immediately afterwards, a Special Transportation Fund was reinstated. But when budget shortfalls continued, legislators continued to use fiscal slight of hand to raid funds dedicated for transportation purposes to meet their obligation to balance the state’s general budget. To prevent such practices the voters of Connecticut in 2018 finally approved a constitutional amendment (also recommended by the Finance Panel) to deter such shenanigans in the future. 

Governor Lamont, who took up the mantle of Connecticut transportation from Governor Malloy in 2019, continued to push for the reinstatement of tolls for several years but to no avail. The legislature and the general public remained adamantly opposed. When considered separate from revenue shortfalls in the general budget, the toll question is both simple and straightforward. History tells us that removing tolls from Connecticut highways and bridges in the 1980s was a grave mistake, as was lowering the gas tax in the 1990s. We know now that a safe, up to date transportation system does more than just move people and goods. It sustains economies and long-term economic growth. Tolls are the most equitable way to collect the revenue necessary to provide such a system. We must not take out our frustration over the ongoing budget crisis on the funding of transportation projects through tolls. We need highway tolls to build the projects proposed in LET’S GO CT and thereby bring Connecticut transportation back up to speed.

TRANSPORTATION TELLS THE STORY OF OUR TIME

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Pogo Cartoon: Earth Day 1971

As I came to the end of writing the second volume in my two-volume history of Connecticut transportation, I began to see different ways in which the story I was telling resonated in today’s world. From an historical perspective, Connecticut is at a crossroads in its transportation story. Events have created a nexus of transportation policies and programs unique in Connecticut history. For the first time since the Europeans arrived in Connecticut nearly four centuries ago, responsibility for all manner of transportation services has been placed under the bureaucratic domain of one mega-governmental agency comprised of two divisions: the Federal Department of Transportation in Washington and within the state government, the Connecticut Department of Transportation. Together, these two agencies act jointly to plan, finance and execute all major transportation improvements in the state, with the federal agency providing the lead on financing, and therefore policy as well. (Completing this hierarchy are the 169 towns in Connecticut, where local projects are conceived and executed.)

This tri-level bureaucracy, a common arrangement today in numerous areas of government services besides transportation, often presents policy makers with complex decisions upon which the transportation future of the state depends. Since both policy and financing flow downhill from Washington through a maze of government bureaucracy, how are decision-makers to determine a transportation system that best serves the needs of Connecticut? We must never forget that transportation, like the provision of all government services, is a political activity rightly subject to the vagaries of our political system. Still, within these constraints, this blog is dedicated to the belief that many important decisions should be influenced not just by the kind of quantitative data that are normally collected by transportation engineers, but also by less formal, descriptive information derived from our state’s history. My hope is that this blog will add relevant aspects of the state’s transportation history to discussions of transportation policy today. History broadens our perspective on present day problems, and this broader, more inclusive perspective can lead to more informed opinions by decision makers and citizen voters alike. 

 As I completed this history and finally saw the full story of Connecticut transportation in one piece across the centuries, I realized how the story of Connecticut Transportation mirrored what I call “the story of our times.” The story of Connecticut transportation has three main characters: the people, by which I mean the number of persons living in the state at any given time and how they use the land on which they live; the technology, which encompasses the changes over time in the modes people used to transport themselves and the goods they produce; and the natural environment, which includes all aspects of the web of life, such as clean air and water, on which humankind depends for survival. Since Europeans colonists arrived in Connecticut nearly four centuries ago, we see a story of an ever-increasing population living within a fixed geographic area but increasingly interdependent with people and services from outside the state and the nation, all sustained by technologies that have upset the ecological balance of the natural environment to the point where imbalances that are detrimental to our survival are global in scope. This is the story of our time: the massive impact of humankind and its technologies on the natural environment. What are we to do? 

Looking back, we can now see how the burst of environmental awareness propagated in the 1960s (symbolized by the whole earth images first broadcast by the Apollo astronauts) was a turning point in this human story of technology versus ecology. Since then, we have educated ourselves on the problem and debated possible solutions. We have even taken limited actions to ameliorate the situation. For example, the trend in the auto industry toward electric vehicles and in the housing industry toward solar and geothermal power. In Connecticut we have recently signed a Transportation Climate Initiative (TCI) with Massachusetts and Rhode Island intended to reduce carbon emissions by 26% over the next decade. All of these are sensible ideas. However, we have yet to take action as a state or a nation commensurate with the scale of the problem; and for good reason. Such solutions threaten our very way of life as Americans, and challenge our long-held belief in technology, unlimited growth and the progress it appears to portend. So, for now, we grapple with trying to understand and take to heart the message that how we live, how we manufacture and consume goods and services, and how we travel across the planet threatens the day-to-day stability of our own existence. As the comic strip character Pogo mused on Earth Day 1971: “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”

History can provide a useful perspective on various aspects of the planetary crisis we face today, including transportation and our attitude toward the land. It is my hope that this blog will prompt a discussion of transportation issues in an historical context that can inform the decisions of policy makers in Connecticut as they face the difficult job of providing for the common good of all our citizens in the decades ahead. Your thoughts, comments and opinions are an important part of this discussion. So, if you have anything too say on this or future blog posts you can send it to me in the comments section below each entry.