A better ride: New evidence on travel and the quality of roads in England and Wales, 1660-1820

Abstract 1 1 Data for this paper was created thanks to grants from: (1) The Economic and social research council, The Occupational Structure of Nineteenth Century Britain, Grant RES-000-23-1579; (2) The Leverhulme Trust, The Occupational Structure of England and Wales c.1379-c1729; (3) the Leverhulme Trust, Transport, Urbanization and Economic Development c.1670-1911 (RPG-2013-093); (4) NSF (SES-1260699), Modelling the Transport Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in England; (5) The Isaac Newton Trust (Cambridge), Transport, Energy and Urbanization c.1670-1911. We thank Max Satchell for foundational work creating GIS shapefiles of the roads. We also thank seminar participants at the University of Cambridge and UC Irvine. All errors are our own. Travel improved dramatically between 1660 and 1820 in England and Wales. This paper uses nearly 100 travellers’ diaries to study the mode choice, speed of road transport and the quality of the roads used from the mid-1600s to 1820. Using mapping software, we digitise journeys made by various travel modes along more than 348,000 journey miles. We document that travel shifted from the saddlehorse to wheeled vehicles and that speed increased, although to a lesser degree in private or hired carriages compared to stagecoaches. We also report a novel measure of road quality using diarists’ descriptions of the road. The reported quality of many main roads went from ‘poor’ to ‘adequate’ or ‘good’ by the early 19 th century. We also show that turnpike trusts, a novel organization for road funding, contributed to significantly better quality and were favoured over other roads by travellers in wheeled vehicles. Our estimates imply that the spread of turnpike trusts can account for most of the road quality change from 1660 to 1820.