This article considers the administration of toll-financed transportation infrastructure in its larger historical context, through an overview of the political economy of public works in the United States. The decision to shift responsibility for California’s toll bridges to a state-level authority in 1929 reflected larger, long-term political and institutional trends as well as the powerful influence of Progressive Era ideology. Similarly, political and institutional developments since the 1970s have propelled initiatives to establish new mechanisms for infrastructure financing, administration, and management in California and elsewhere and suggest that private toll roads may again be on the horizon in a new era of free-market ideology.
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