What is a motorway, freeway, toll road or turnpike? A motorway of a freeway is a road designed to allow the free flow of traffic with no restrictions such as traffic signals. You have to pay a fee, or toll, to travel on some of these roads. They are often called turnpikes or toll roads.

A German autobahn, the first high speed roads ever built.

Good, long distance roads have always been important for successful nations. The Romans pioneered this with roads that criss-crossed their empire 2000 years ago.

These were paved roads, that is roads with a surface of stone blocks so that the surface could be used in all weather.

They were used for trade, but much more importantly they were military roads designed to allow the army to get quickly to trouble spots, and made to a standard that allowed supply carts to travel on them as well.

But after the Romans, wheeled traffic stopped being long distance for nearly two thousand years. That was because traffic was mostly small scale and local. There were no grand empires to service, and no taxes from empires to pay for them either.

The British were the first to begin to change all of this in the 17th century. The problem of paying for them was overcome by introducing tolls. These were known as turnpike roads because the roads were blocked off by a barrier of a pike across the road, and to let traffic pass, the pike had to be turned to one side.

The 17th century turnpike road from London to Lands End at the tip of SW England.

These were roads mainly for stagecoaches. Only the wealthy could use them. Think of them as the airline routes of the time.

At the end of the 18th century, French emperor Napoleon, was in charge of France. He looked back over the history of other powerful military nations and he saw the Roman road system, and he liked what he saw.

Using this as a guide, he built military roads out from his capital, Paris, like spokes of a wheel. They were called Routes National (National roads) and they got troops to the border of the nation quickly.

When Napoleon was defeated, transport was changing. But it was not changing to road use, but rather to canal and then railways. It took the invention of the automobile to change that.

But even then roads grew piecemeal, and they were narrow and had lots of junctions.

But then came Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s. Hitler looked back at his military heroes such as Napoleon and saw the benefits of the Routes National. So he began his own scheme, and the new concrete-paved roads again ran from the main cities to the edges of the country - in this case in preparation for attack. These roads were called 'autobahnen' (singular 'autobahn', meaning road track). When Hitler started the Second World War he was able to send his troops to other countries very quickly using the Autobahn network. This was part of his plan for a fast conquest. It worked.

Later in the war, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower (later US president) saw this system, and he remembered it. In the years after the war he proposed a similar system for the US - not for attack, but for defense, and also to promote trade and provide emergency routes across the country. That is how the US Interstate Highway System started in 1956. It was a military network.

Other countries also began their networks at the same time. In the UK the first high speed road – called a motorway – was opened in 1957 and called the M1.

Other countries followed, as you can see from these pictures. Today, freeway, motorway, autobahn, autoroute, autostrade and many other words are used by countries for their own high speed systems. All countries now rely on them to move goods about, and many factories have grown up around junctions.