The bridge was just one part of the town’s road network, something that few smaller outports would have had in the 1800s. Twillingate’s old carriage roads were generally considered excellent, no mean feat in colonial Newfoundland! Its roads were described as clean, and made of whitish brown gravel and limestone. This mixture baked to the hardness of concrete and was considered superb for cyclists. By 1906 the Twillingate islands had about sixty-four kilometres of roads.

Although good by the standards of the day, Twillingate’s thoroughfares had their problems. In 1911 a Twilllingate Sun reader complained that Tickle Bridge was too narrow for carriage traffic; riders frequently had the paint scraped off their vehicles’ wheels or risked losing them altogether. This reader felt that the local road board should widen the structure, but it seems this was not done at the time. By the 1930s new problems arose. The old roads weren’t as well maintained as they had been twenty years earlier, and were never intended for automobile traffic.