As keen travellers, the Ruskin family epitomised a change of habits on British roads, an increase in longer journeys beyond parish boundaries which contrasted with the largely local travel patterns of most people before 1800. This points to the defect in road management which turnpikes were designed to overcome: the fact that road maintenance was the responsibility of local parishes. In the hundred years before Ruskin 's birth, inter-regional exchange of goods increased, road traffic became less local in character. Given that many roads took on the character of thoroughfares linking distant centres of population and industry, it was unjust to expect farmers and labourers to work unrewarded mainly for the benefit of strangers as they had done in the parish system begun in the Highways Act of 1555 and its sucessors.
The New Highways Act of 1832 meant that parishioners were no longer required to work a number of days each year on road repairs, but instead were levied in order to finance professional surveyors and engineers. Turnpike Trusts were inaugurated in various parts of the country, largely by businessmen wishing to improve the passage of goods from their area, and entailed the levying of tolls to pay for a professional improvement of communications. Although the first Turnpike Trust was established in 1653 in Huntingdonshire, this was an early, atypical example, and the trend did not become established until the latter half of the eighteenth century. In the 1830s 1116 Turnpike Trusts existed, controlling over 20,000 miles of roads, one fifth of Britain's roads. Although clearly a revolution for the economy, Turnpike roads were viewed with much suspicion by certain writers, notably John Clare and William Cobbett.