John Majewski

John Majewski is an historian who, with the economist Daniel B. Klein, investigated the nineteenth-century American plank-road boom. Their account connects a practical transportation problem to a nationwide building craze and its collapse, showing how people can take others’ choices as evidence and follow them into a costly mistake.

Historical Research

Majewski and Klein studied the plank-road fever that arose amid Americans’ broader efforts to improve transportation during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, cut travel time between the East Coast and the western interior in half and reduced shipping costs by 90 percent. Canals and railroads connected major towns, but did little to help the many people living outside them get goods to market or travel between smaller communities. Local roads, maintained in separate stretches by villages, were often poorly drained and rough, making travel slow and wearing on vehicles and draft animals.

The Plank-Road Boom

Engineer George Geddes saw plank roads, introduced in Canada in the early 1840s, as a possible solution. Their wooden planks, laid over two lines of timber, offered an evident improvement over muddy, rutted paths. The unanswered question was whether they would last long enough to justify the cost of building and maintaining toll roads. Geddes estimated that a typical road would last eight years; in 1846, he persuaded fellow residents of Salina, New York, to charter a company to build the state’s first plank road.

That road succeeded, and enthusiasm spread first through New York, then through the mid-Atlantic states and the Midwest. Geddes became a spokesman for the industry, while promoters elsewhere encouraged similar projects. Within a decade, New York had 352 plank-road companies, and the United States had more than a thousand. Majewski and Klein’s research later showed that the roads’ actual lifespan was closer to four years, far below Geddes’s estimate and the twelve years some other advocates proposed. Their short service life made them too expensive for companies to maintain. By the late 1850s, it was clear that plank roads were no general solution; although a few lasted into the 1880s, nearly all had been abandoned by the end of the Civil War.

Information Cascade

Majewski and Klein’s account serves as a historical case of an information cascade: people facing uncertainty treated earlier choices as evidence, and each new project reinforced the apparent legitimacy of the idea. The first Salina road succeeded, as did roads built in the years immediately afterward. Those visible successes made plank roads seem like a ready-made answer to the problem of local transportation, while reducing the incentive to consider alternatives. The crucial weakness—the roads did not last long enough—became evident only after the building wave had spread widely.

The episode illustrates the difference between learning from others and simply following them. Early results were real, but they did not establish that plank roads would remain cost-effective over time. As construction multiplied, the number of imitators strengthened confidence in the solution without resolving the underlying question of durability. Majewski and Klein thus connect the boom’s eventual failure not just to an inaccurate estimate, but to the way an initially persuasive example can crowd out scrutiny until its hidden limitations become difficult to ignore.