Road transport

Road transport (British English) or road transportation (American English) is the transport of passengers or goods on roads.

The first methods of road transport were horses, oxen or even humans carrying goods over dirt tracks that often followed game trail. The Persians later built a network of Royal Roads across their empire.

With the advent of the Roman Empire, there was a need for armies to be able to travel quickly from one area to another, and the roads that existed were often muddy, which greatly delayed the movement of large masses of troops. To resolve this issue, the Romans built great roads. The Roman roads used deep roadbeds of crushed stone as an underlying layer to ensure that they kept dry, as the water would flow out from the crushed stone, instead of becoming mud in clay soils. The Islamic Caliphate later built tar-paved roads in Baghdad.

As states developed and became richer, especially with the Renaissance, new roads and bridges began to be built, often based on Roman designs. Although there were attempts to rediscover Roman methods, there was little useful innovation in road building before the 18th century.

Starting in the early 18th century, the British Parliament began to pass a series of acts that gave the local justices powers to erect toll-gates on the roads, in exchange for professional upkeep. The toll-gate erected at Wades mill became the first effective toll-gate in England. The first scheme that had trustees who were not justices was established through a Turnpike Act in 1707, for a section of the London-Chester road between Foothill and Stony Stafford. The basic principle was that the trustees would manage resources from the several parishes through which the highway passed, augment this with tolls from users from outside the parishes and apply the whole to the maintenance of the main highway. This became the pattern for the turn piking of a growing number of highways, sought by those who wished to improve flow of commerce through their part of a county.

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Wikipedia