MORE than 140 years have elapsed since Jamaica last imposed a toll on travellers, a period that was characterised by civil disobedience and periodic riots that eventually forced the cancellation of the road tax after 25 years.

A two-month boycott of the new Highway 2000 and its state of the art toll bridge, announced by residents of Portmore, St Catherine, seems tame by comparison to history.

The disobedience has got a lot more civil, with legal challenges in court and lobby groups advocating against the road fee.

Peasant farmers brought tolling to an end by smashing up the infrastructure.

There is little possibility that French firm TransJamaican Highway will gather up its 30 or so tolling booths in the face of letters of protest and residents’ bombardment of talk shows.

The first tolling system was introduced in 1838 when a law was passed for the maintenance of Hope Road leading from Montgomery Corner to the junction of the Hope and Hog Hole Rivers in the upper reaches of St Andrew.

Montgomery Corner is the area now known as Cross Roads, the section of the capital considered the border between uptown and downtown Kingston.

The newly freed slaves paid tolls ranging from 5-10 pence on carriages, horses, mules, cattle, sheep, goat and pigs.

The system, however, was seen as a strategic ploy to make the cost of living so high that the peasants would give up their subsistence livelihoods and return to the plantations, re-establishing the status quo under slavery.

The toll was also implemented alongside a 12-fold increase in the cost of food and clothing.

According to a historian writing in Jamaica’s oldest newspaper, The Gleaner, in 1966, other tolling systems were established on the roads leading to Savanna-la-Mar in Westmoreland, a building on Spanish Town Road near the Ferry River, Kingston, the archway by the old fort at Rockfort, Kingston and the location where the Matilda’s Corner Police Station in Liguanea, St Andrew, now sits.

Another apparent tolling station was established at what is now known as Toll Gate, a community in Clarendon, and it is believed that this is how the district got its name.

Toll Gate, in those days, was a privately owned estate whose owners charged peasants who walked across their land.

In 1851, a Board of Commissioners of Highways and Bridges was appointed to take control and maintain the toll gates, as well as the highways they connected.

While the tolling system was strongly opposed from its introduction, the real test of its continuation, and the beginning of its demise, never came until February 1859.

Savanna-la-Mar, the capital of Westmoreland, became the centre of attention as the peasants decided that they were fed up altogether with it. Because of the toll locations along the roads leading to Savanna-la-Mar, they had to pay a toll for passage each time they fetched water, a basic necessity.

As reported in the Falmouth Post on March 4, 1859, they rioted for three nights after which the toll gates as well as the toll-keepers’ houses were destroyed.

The riots spread to the rest of Westmoreland and continued from June to October.

Police from other parishes, including St James, Hanover, Trelawny and St Elizabeth, had to be deployed to Westmoreland to restore order.

They failed.

Nevertheless, some of the protestors were caught and although they stood trial, their supporters who turned out in large numbers at the proceedings, behaved in a boisterous manner, forcing the early adjournment of the cases.

In 1863, the same highway board of commissioners sold off the toll gates after a law abolishing tolling was passed.

It’s unclear what the equivalent value of 5-10 pence would be today according to the present value of money.

But the $60 toll to use the new Portmore bridge is equivalent to 50 pence, based on to the value of the Jamaican dollar to the pound sterling at the close of trading on Kingston’s foreign exchange market Friday (£1:J$121.15).

The toll bridge and its 23 booths officially opened for business Saturday, with much fanfare.

Other areas of Highway 2000, from Bushy Park to Vineyards, have been tolled since September 2003.

editorial@jamaicaobserver.com