to relieve congestion on US 1 and Route 15 (the Merritt and Wilbur Cross parkways), design work began in 1954. The Connecticut Turnpike opened to traffic on January 2, 1958 at 2:30 p.m. However, the westernmost portion of the highway (the connecting Greenwich with the New England Thruway) opened 10 months later. Tolls were originally collected through a series of eight toll booths along the route. The Connecticut Turnpike was designed and built much differently than other toll roads built around the same time. Unlike toll roads in other states that operated under semi-autonomous, quasi-public toll road authorities, the Connecticut Turnpike was operated by the Connecticut Highway Department (later the Connecticut Department of Transportation) from its inception. Additionally, unlike toll roads in other states where revenues collected from motorists were legally required to be kept within the toll road authority and used to finance the facility's construction and upkeep, toll revenues from the Connecticut Turnpike were placed into the state's general fund and used for highway and non-highway expenditures alike. Finally, the closely spaced interchanges and eight mainline barriers were a result of each town through which the Connecticut Turnpike passed being guaranteed a certain number of access points to gain the support of each affected town for construction of the highway. This is in contrast to toll roads built in neighboring states with widely spaced interchanges that normally featured a ticket system where one obtained a ticket at entering the toll road, then paid a distance-based fare upon exiting. The turnpike was renamed after former Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge on December 31, 1985, two months after the tolls were removed. Local legend is the initial phase of turnpike construction in 1954 was so disruptive in heavily Republican Fairfield County that local voters there turned on incumbent Republican Governor Lodge, leading to his defeat by Abraham Ribicoff. Initially, the Connecticut Turnpike was signed as an east–west route, even after the I-95 designation was added to the turnpike between Greenwich and Waterford in the early 1960s. Signs indicating I-95/Connecticut Turnpike as an east–west route existed in places until the early 1990s, when the remaining east–west signage was replaced by north–south signage. From Waterford to Killingly, the turnpike was initially designated as Route 52 in 1967, following the opening of the toll-free section of Route 52 from Killingly to the Massachusetts border. To accommodate the truncation of the Hartford to Providence