Opinion: Unclog Our Circulatory System Without Tolls

This Opinion piece appears in the May 16 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

By Bill Graves

President & CEO

American Trucking Associations

In the trucking industry, we’re fond of calling ourselves the lifeblood of the American economy — delivering the goods that our stores, hospitals and restaurants need to maintain our quality of life.

And if our nation’s trucks are our economy’s blood, then our roads, highways and bridges are our economy’s circulatory system. We even call some of these routes by medical names — arteries or arterials — emphasizing the metaphorical connection.

Graves

Like our own circulatory systems, it is of vital importance that we keep the veins and arteries of our economy clear and able to keep the fuel and food and clothing we depend on moving.

Last year, Congress and the Obama administration took a big step toward keeping our infrastructure healthy when they came together to pass the FAST Act. The new highway bill will spend $305 billion on roads, bridges and highways over the next five years. However, this is just a drop in the bucket to address our national need.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that we need to spend $7.6 trillion by 2040 to bring our surface transportation infrastructure up to acceptable health. While that includes things such as rail and commuter projects, it also includes our highways and bridges. It is a tremendous amount of money that our governments, local, state and federal, need to invest in our roadways.

The easiest way to get that revenue would be for the federal government to raise the fuel tax, which hasn’t been raised since 1993 and now pays for nearly half of what it used to due to inflation. The fuel tax efficiently raises money for roads, with just more than a penny per dollar going to administrative overhead and almost 98 cents going to actual steel, concrete and asphalt.

While the federal government has not increased its commitment, many states are stepping up to fill the widening gap — with more than a dozen raising their fuel taxes in recent years.

However, disturbingly, many of these states are still falling victim to the siren song of tolls and tolling — hearing the allure of “free money” without having to raise taxes. This presupposes that tolls aren’t taxes — which they are. It also presupposes that somehow the investments needed to collect a toll — new equipment, administrative overhead, toll collectors and so on and so on — are minimal.

For every dollar paid at a tollbooth, as little as 65 cents gets put into actual infrastructure investment. The rest goes to paying toll collectors, billing technology, catching toll scofflaws and other administrative expenses.

That is the direct cost of tolling. We don’t talk enough about the indirect costs of building tollbooths on bridges and highways. There are countless studies, and our own experience, which show that when tolls are imposed or raised, drivers — both commercial and commuter — seek to avoid them.

This pushes traffic onto secondary arteries — forcing more vehicles onto smaller roads that are not necessarily designed to handle the volume. This unforeseen congestion leads to more accidents, to unnecessary injuries and fatalities, to delays and to increased emissions.

Tolls sound like a good deal, and their appeal is easy to understand. Advocates say it is revenue without raising taxes. They say tolls are the best, most efficient way to raise money. We know those arguments are specious from what we know about tolls — that they are taxes not just on our wallets, but on our environment, on our time and in many cases on our health and safety.

Tolls are a good way for politicians to avoid making hard choices. And they’re good for Wall Street, which gets to sell bonds against future toll revenues — revenues that often fall short of projections because drivers avoid the tolled roads.

It is important to keep our nation’s roads and bridges healthy, but it is apparent that tolls are a cure that’s worse than the disease.

Roads are not free, and they aren’t cheap. It is incumbent on all of us to pay what is necessary to maintain a safe and efficient highway system. Trucking has been vocally asking to pay more at the pump — to have our diesel taxes raised so we can finance needed infrastructure improvements.

The FAST Act expires in just over four years, and states are debating these issues all the time. There is no time like right now — this Infrastructure Week — to raise these issues to shine a light on the need to keep our economic lifeblood flowing and to keep our veins and arteries clear of congestion — congestion that chokes billions of dollars out of our economy and wastes countless hours.

American Trucking Associations, the largest national trade federation in the trucking industry, has headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and affiliated associations in every state. ATA owns Transport Topics.