The term shunpiking comes from the word "shun", meaning to avoid, and "pike," a term referring to turnpikes, which were roads which required payment of a fee (or toll) to travel on them. Payment was made at a toll station where a pike, a long wooden shaft, was placed across the road barring passage. After payment, the pike would be turned, or raised, to allow vehicles to pass. Persons engaged in shunpiking are called shunpikers.

Shunpiking has also come to mean an avoidance of major highways (regardless of tolls) in preference for bucolic and scenic interludes along lightly travelled country roads.

For some, practice of shunpiking involved a form of boycott of tolls, by taking another route, perhaps slower, longer, or under poorer road conditions, or a combination of any or all of these factors.

One such example of shunpiking as a form of boycott occurred at the James River Bridge in eastern Virginia. After years of lower than anticipated revenues on the narrow privately-funded structure built in 1928, the state of Virginia finally purchased the facility in 1949 and increased the tolls in 1955 without visibly improving the roadway, with the notable exception of a new toll plaza.

The increased toll rates incensed the public and business users alike. In a well-publicized example of shunpiking, Joseph W. Luter Jr. , head of Smithfield Packing Company in Smithfield, Virginia, the producer of world-famous Smithfield hams, ordered his truck drivers to take a different route and cross a smaller and cheaper bridge. Tolls continued for 20 more years, and were finally removed from the old bridge in 1976 when construction began on a toll-free replacement structure.