The real title of many history books is actually the subtitle, while the colorful phrase before the colon is merely decorative. Examples that come to mind include Blood in the Water, Our Beloved Kin, and What Hath God Wrought, titles that barely hint at what lies between the book covers. Not so with Richard DeLuca's Paved Roads and Public Money: Connecticut Transportation in the Age of Internal Combustion. This book does deal broadly with Connecticut transportation since the 1890s, but its emphasis is on the building of highways with public funds.Paved Roads and Public Money is the sequel to DeLuca's 2011 study, Post Roads & Iron Horses: Transportation in Connecticut from Colonial Times to the Age of Steam, which took the story from Native American footpaths to the dominance of the steam-powered railroad in the late nineteenth century. The new book tracks the work of the Connecticut Department of Transportation and its predecessors since the creation of the first state Highway Commission in 1895. There is also an introductory chapter on the use and manufacture of bicycles in Connecticut, and a longer interlude on Connecticut's contributions to the invention and manufacture of airplanes. The research draws on state documents and newspaper articles.As DeLuca points out, it is the very nature of transportation to create spatial connections, and so a story of transportation in one state cannot be disentangled from the story of transportation in general. This is particularly true of Connecticut, whose economy has historically been linked with Boston and New York, and whose highways and railroads are essential corridors between these metropolitan hubs. Further, the subject of transportation intersects, as it does in this book, with issues of technological change, business expansion, urban and suburban development, and environmental damage. DeLuca's conclusion highlights three main “thematic elements” that run through his two volumes: land, technology, and law, each of them subdivided into five distinct points. Amid all this complexity, one trend seems pre-eminent: DeLuca declares that “the reversal of the government's relationship that began in the 1920s and was completed in the 1960s is the most fundamental fact to be gleaned from the story of Connecticut transportation.” (149)After the early pages on the bicycle, DeLuca notes the return of Connecticut's last privately owned turnpike to public control in 1897. He traces state highway work through the early “trunk line system” of major routes, with significant federal aid as early as 1916. The expanding use of automobiles demanded constant highway improvements. The overburdened corridor between New York and New Haven drew particular attention as the state planned and built the Merritt Parkway, whose first section opened in 1938. By then, state officials had already begun planning the Wilbur Cross parkway and highway, which ultimately extended from New Haven to the Massachusetts state line at Union. The state planned a network of superhighways, the most important of which was the “Connecticut Turnpike,” today's I-95 and I-395. State highway work was funded first through tax revenue, then supplemented by tolls, bonded indebtedness, and federal funds, especially after the passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. DeLuca describes the political and administrative challenges of these early expressway projects in detail. He traces the corrupt financial shenanigans in the Merritt Parkway project, which cost the state extra millions and ultimately landed the state's purchasing agent in prison.Expressway construction continued unabated through the 1950s and 1960s, contributing to the redistribution of Connecticut's population from urban clusters to suburban sprawl. Readers interested in the history of the routes they regularly travel will find information in the text and appendices. I was especially interested in the Hartford area projects, which included the deplorable original interchange of I-84 and I-91, the aesthetically sensitive widening of the Bulkeley Bridge, and the abortive proposal to tunnel an expressway under Bushnell Park. West Hartford activists helped inaugurate a new era in Connecticut's expressway history in the 1970s when they prevented the construction of I-291 along the town's western edge, where it would have threatened the purity of metropolitan Hartford's reservoirs. Another grassroots effort blocked construction of I-86 from Greater Hartford to Providence.Examining Connecticut transportation from the perspective of the state's road builders, DeLuca pays limited attention to ordinary people. It is easy to forget, while reading this book, that daily travel in the early twentieth century often involved a trolley or interurban electric line. Dense webs of trolleys covered each city, while an interurban network linked towns from Greenwich to Enfield and Thompson. The demise of this network is noted only briefly in this volume. There is minimal coverage of water transportation.The last chapter, “A Public Monopoly,” examines the era since the 1960s, in which all modes of transportation have been shaped by federal and state policy. DeLuca traces the story of railroads from the New Haven Railroad's death throes in the post-war decades through the state's management of commuter trains and the creation of regional bus districts in areas once served by trolleys. The final pages of that chapter consider proposals to expand passenger train service even as the state struggles to maintain existing highways and bridges.The twentieth-century creation of government-funded paved roads may in retrospect seem an environmental blunder that hacked up Connecticut's beautiful countryside and contributed to climate change. Yet it may have seemed very different to people at the time. Driving a private car on a public road may at first have struck Connecticut people as a liberating experience, freeing their travel from the grip of the monopolistic New Haven Railroad and its trolley subsidiary, the Connecticut Company. While providing an excellent overview of state transportation policy, DeLuca does not explore what Connecticut's people felt about the rise of paved roads and public money.