The cost of making and repairing turnpike roads, especially under the primitive conditions still widely retained, notwithstanding the improved methods introduced by Telford and McAdam, was in itself a most serious item, apart from the excessive expenditure on administration. Dr James Anderson says on this subject in the issue of his "Recreations" for November, 1800:—
"I have been assured, and believe it to be true, though I cannot pledge myself for the certainty of the fact, that there is annually laid out on repairs upon the road from Hyde Park to Hounslow considerably above £1000 a mile. A turnpike road cannot be made in almost any situation for less, as I am told, than £1000 per mile; but where it is of considerable width, as near great towns, it will run from £1500 to £2000 per mile; and in annual repairs, including the purchase price of materials, carting them to the road, spreading, raking off, and carting away again, from £100 to £1000 a mile."
The trustees generally raised loans to meet their first expenses, payment of interest being guaranteed out of the tolls levied; but though, at one time, and especially before the competition of railways became active, the security was regarded as adequate, an unduly costly management, combined with decreasing receipts from tolls, resulted in the piling up of huge financial liabilities which the trusts found it impossible to clear off in addition to meeting current expenditure. The Select Committee on Turnpike Trusts in 1839 reported on this subject: "The present debt of the turnpike trusts in England and Wales exceeds £9,000,000, and it is annually increasing, in consequence of the practice prevailing in several of the trusts of converting the unpaid interest into principal, the trustees giving bonds bearing interest for the amount of interest due." At this time there were no fewer than eighty-four trusts which had paid no interest on loans for several years, and there were said to be some trusts which had paid no interest for sixty years. Sir James McAdam, son of John Loudon McAdam, informed the Select Committee of 1839 that the amount of unpaid interest on the trusts at that time was £1,031,096.
In order to improve their financial position, the trustees generally adopted the expedient either of seeking Parliamentary authority to increase their tolls or of setting up the largest possible number of toll-gates along their own particular bit of road. In either case it was the road-user who paid.
The Select Committee of 1819 reported that in the three preceding Sessions ninety turnpike trusts, seeking renewal of their Acts, had asked for authority to increase their tolls on the ground that they could not pay their debts without the assistance of Parliament. The alternative to an increase of tolls was carried so far that it became customary for the trusts to set up a toll-gate wherever there was the slightest excuse for so doing.
"In some places," says J. Kearsley Fowler, in "Records of Old Times," "as, for instance, my native town of Aylesbury, the place was literally hemmed in like a fortified city,—not even an outlet to exercise a horse without paying a toll." There were, he tells us, seven different trusts to maintain at Aylesbury alone.
Mr George Masefield, a solicitor residing at Ledbury, Herefordshire, said when giving evidence before the Select Committee on Turnpike Trusts in 1864 that in the twenty-one miles between Ledbury and Kingston, a journey he frequently made, he had to go through eight turnpike gates. In the eight miles' journey to Newent he passed through four gates and paid three times; and in the thirteen miles to Worcester he went through six gates and paid at five.
In Gloucestershire, said the "Morning Star" of September 30, 1856, "it sometimes happens you have to pay five turnpikes in twelve miles"; though such were the inequalities of the burden that in some other counties, said the same paper, one could go for miles without paying anything.
These inequalities had been previously pointed out in the "Westminster Review" article. In speaking of the practice followed in the location of turnpikes, the writer declared that "gates are sometimes placed so as to tax one portion and exempt another, so as to make strangers and travellers pay, while those who chiefly profit by the roads, and who destroy them most, are exempted." He further said that "the Welsh, with their characteristic cunning, have contrived to exempt their own heavy carts and to levy their tolls on the light barouches of unlucky visitors"; that one might see, in Scotland, three toll-gates, and all to be paid, in the space of a hundred yards; that one might, as against this, ride thirty miles without paying one toll; and that "the inhabitants of Greenwich pay the tolls for the half of Kent."
London in 1818 had twelve turnpike trusts for 210 miles of road. The tolls they collected in that year amounted to £97,482; the expenses were £98,856, and the accumulated debt of the dozen trusts was £62,658.