During this period every province except Taranaki had at least one toll road or toll bridge.

In Auckland tolls were levied to pay for improvement of the Great South Road to help open up new lands for settlement.

Wellington had tolls on bridges over the Wanganui River and the Manawatu Gorge.

The Nelson-Blenheim coach road was tolled in both Nelson (at Waimea) and in Marlborough (Wairau Valley).

Canterbury had tolls on all major bridges between Christchurch and Amberley, Timaru and Lyttelton.

In most of the provinces the tolls generated up to 10% of the province's road funding. The remainder of the funding came mainly from rates and the Provincial Council's share of revenue from sale of Crown land's within the province. However, it is in Southland and Otago where we find the most extreme variations from this general model adopted by the other provinces.

In Southland the settlers generally were averse to establishing county councils or district road boards and contributed to their local roads by voluntary subscription of money, material or manpower. The Provincial Council expended it's share of the land fund on constructing provincial highways with no contribution expected from local communities. Most toll bridges and ferries were leased to private operators by the Provincial Council and the few county councils that existed.

In Otago the Provinial Council encouraged the establishment of local authorities by allocating it's share of the land fund as a pound for pound subsidy on the rates collected by the county councils, town boards and district road boards. This resulted in Otago having both the highest percentage of settlers paying rates and the highest average rates per acre. Nevertheless, Otago's use of tolls on roads and bridges was so extensive that, despite having the highest road spending from rates and the land fund of any province, tolls provided an astonishing 25% of Otago's spending on roads during the 1860s.

In 1870, when the Vogel government launched it's great public works program, New Zealand was experiencing its worst ever per capita road death rates. These deaths were almost entirely the result of travellers drowning while fording streams and rivers. Fortunately the Vogel government was wise enough to realise that this dreadful loss of life was not due to the careless or wreckless behaviour of road users but was simply due to a funding mechanism wherein funding largely followed traffic growth rather preceding it. Fortunately, Vogel understood how private property developement funding operated. This entails mortgaging land to raise capital to build roads which allow the land to be sold in smaller lots at higher prices per acre. The loans are then repaid from these increased land prices. Under the Public Works program the government ensured that it borrowed sufficient money to include bridges on the roads that it was building to open up crown lands for sale to immigrants. The dramatic increase in revenues from land sales alllowed the government to make a further giant leap in the funding of bridges on existing roads which made tolls obsolete. In 1875 the provincial councils were abolished and the Otago system of allocating the land fund as a subsidy on rates revenue was adopted across the whole country which resulted in a dramatic increase in road funding and consequently a dramatic improvement in road conditions. Further, local authorities were able to access public works loans moneys to build bridges and thus take advantage of the lower interest rates the government was able to obtain. The government also allowed most toll loans to be refinanced at lower interest rates on the condition that the tolls were abolished and the loans repaid from rates revenue, although with the rates subsidies the loans were really being repaid from increased land values. Within a decade this resulted in dramatic reductions in both types of road toll.

Unfortunately, both the loans and subsidies were limited to a maximum of 100,000 pounds per year which was a generous amount to in 1875 but by the early 1900s it was becoming an increasingly inconsequential amount particularly as the country's roading needs evolved from those of a colony to those of a prosperous Dominion. This led to the second wave of toll roads.