Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge

March 10, 2009

Drawing on previously unavailable archives, Paying the Toll describes the high-stakes struggles for control of the Golden Gate Bridge, and offers a rare inside look at the powerful and secretive agency that built a regional transportation empire with its

Paying the Toll
Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge
Louise Nelson Dyble
312 pages | 6 x 9 | 29 illus.
Cloth Mar 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4147-1 | $39.95s | £26.00
A volume in the American Business, Politics, and Society series

Since its opening in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge has become an icon for the beauty and prosperity of the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as a symbol of engineering achievement. Constructing the bridge posed political and financial challenges that were at least as difficult as those faced by the project's builders. To meet these challenges, northern California boosters created a new kind of agency: an autonomous, self-financing special district. The Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District developed into a powerful organization that shaped the politics and government of the Bay Area as much as the bridge shaped its physical development.

From the moment of the bridge district's incorporation in 1928, its managers pursued their own agenda. They used all the resources at their disposal to preserve their control over the bridge, cultivating political allies, influencing regional policy, and developing an ambitious public relations program. Undaunted by charges of mismanagement and persistent efforts to turn the bridge (as well as its lucrative tolls) over to the state, the bridge district expanded into mass transportation, taking on ferry and bus operations to ensure its survival to this day.

Drawing on previously unavailable archives, Paying the Toll gives us an inside view of the world of high-stakes development, cronyism, and bureaucratic power politics that have surrounded the Golden Gate Bridge since its inception.

"In this magnificent gem of a book, Louise Nelson Dyble takes the reader from the dark corners of avaricious public officialdom and smoke-filled rooms to the bright vistas and architectural wonder of the Golden Gate Bridge itself. At once steward of the public interest, notorious bureaucracy, and gateway to northern California, the Bridge and Highway District emerges in Dyble's telling as the center of a multilayered history of the state. The bridge and its legacy have found their historian."—Robert O. Self, Brown University

"Not merely the history of one particularly unresponsive and incompetent government agency that managed to survive—even thrive—despite decades of public discontent and organized opposition from influential politicians and business leaders, Paying the Toll provides us with greater understanding of the institutional structure of American government. A must-read for everyone concerned about our fragmented public sector and its difficulties confronting the demands of the twenty-first century."—Gail Radford, author of Modern Housing for America

Louise Nelson Dyble is Associate Director for Research at the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at the University of Southern California.

Link: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14601.html