Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - X. Internal Communications - 3. Country Roads. By C. E. Gyllenberg
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628 x. internal communications.
1
million kronor. Out of the State grant, more than 4-5 million kronor have
fallen to each of the läns of Norrbotten and Västerbotten. Of låte years,
the share of Norrland has still further increased, so that for 1909—13
an amount of 2 950 000 kronor fell to the four northernmost läns out of
a total of 7 200 000 kronor. -—• In several läns the County Councils also
make grants towards the construction and improvement of the roads.
Conformably to old legal enactments, the roads were divided into four kinds:
high-roads, which, had to be 6 meters wide, church-roads and mill-roads, which
should be 3"6 m wide, and market-roads. In the 18th century, there was
also a difference made between court- or hundred-roads — joining two hundreds
and their courts of assizes — and parish-roads, comprising the former church- and
mill-roads; less important were the village-roads, which had to be kept in good
repair by the respective villages. During later times, the public roads were
classified into high-roads or ldng’s highways, hundred-roads and parish-roads. The
law of 1891 concerning roads, which has been in force since 1895, makes no
other difference than between high-roads and village-roads. 1912, there were
19 049 kilometers of high-roads and 43 477 kilometers of village-roads, to which
may be added the 800 kilometers of town streets, which are considered as
forming part of the net of roads in the Kingdom.
The task of keeping the roads in repair has, in Sweden, ever since olden
times fallen on the land, i. e., on all those persons who owned and
cultivated the ground, and so the burden was, at quite an early date,
distributed upon the farms. Only the construction and repair of large bridges
was made the joint business of one or more hundreds.
Many runic stones from the time of the Vikings commemorate men who
had built roads or bridges. And the fact that the Church — though, in general,
she had her land exempted from contributions as far as possible — constantly
took part in the repair of the roads that ran by or through her estates, bears
witness to this work being considered as highly important for civilization and
for the interests of the Church, and also to the fact of its being too heavy a
burden to be borne by the assessed land alone. The expedient, resorted to in many
places abroad, of finding means for the repair of the roads by levying a fee
from the way-farers, has been practised in Sweden only to a small extent, and
then chiefly at large bridges, for the construction of which the communes
or the hundreds had been obliged to raise a loan repayable over a long
amortization period.
For many centuries, the repair of roads has been incumbent only on the
assessed land, i. e., on the farm-owners, but with the exemption of certain
farms, works, mills, taxed outlying grounds, and the country parsonages
of town clergymen; the properties with special privileges (Säterier) in
Bohuslän, Halland, Skåne, and Blekinge — provinces ceded by Denmark
to Sweden in 1658 — were also dispensed from road-service. Previous
to 1895, the hundreds had to keep up the highroads and hundred-roads;
each parish kept its parish-roads; and each town, the roads within its own
boundaries. After many complaints about this burden, the road-service
was finally placed on other taxable objects than landed estates by the
Law about Roads, of 1891. Since 1895, a certain tax has been levied on
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