States Eye More Toll Roads

By Michele Fuetsch, Staff Reporter

This story appears in the Feb. 9 print edition of Transport Topics.

In a whirl of activity that is expected to accelerate in coming years, states are making toll roads a permanent part of the nation’s highway system and eyeing toll dollars as a way to plug gaping budget deficits.

Between 1992 and 2006, new toll road development increased to  75 miles a year from 50 miles and over the next decade is likely to reach more than 180 miles annually, according to a report from the Federal Highway Administration.

Texas leads the country in toll-road development with 78 projects either completed or in development, according to the report released last month. California follows Texas, and Florida is third.

“Although toll revenues are currently a relatively small part of overall highway revenues — $8 billion out of $165 nationally — tolls are an essential source of income” for some states, according to the report.

Some toll projects focus on entirely new highways, the report said. For example, North and South Carolina have eight tolled highways each under design or construction.

Other projects consist of such features as high-occupancy toll lanes added to existing highways in congested urban areas such as Northern Virginia, around Washington, D.C.

“Toll roads do better in times of weak federal government,” said Neil Gray, director of government affairs for the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association. “There’s no one giving out free money.”

There has been a cycle to toll road building, Gray said. “The grand era  . . . was post-World War II, before the federal highway network.”

According to the FHWA report, most of the new toll development is in states with new, fast-growing urban centers, such as Colorado, and in states that have had toll roads for decades, such as Illinois and Pennsylvania.

The report also found that, while most of the new toll facilities are developed by public agencies, more than 20% of them now involve  public-private partnerships.

American Trucking Associations has been encouraging an increase in federal fuel taxes to finance infrastructure maintenance and improvements, not tolls. ATA believes fuel taxes are the most equitable and efficient way to support the transportation system, said John Lynch, the group’s vice president for federation relations.

Typically, when roads are tolled, 20% to 30% of the revenue goes to administrative overhead, “whether you’re talking about electronic tolling or personal tolling with a person in the booth,” Lynch said.

Fuel taxes also create a “level playing field” for truckers, Lynch said, but tolling creates what he called “bad actors,” truckers who compromise safety by using inappropriate roads to avoid paying tolls.

ATA accepts that states will build new toll roads to increase traffic capacity, Lynch said, but the federation opposes tolling existing interstate lanes because taxes on trucks and other vehicles have paid for those highways over and over.

Although the federal report deals with new toll lanes in the nation’s transportation network, toll fever is sweeping the states in other ways. On existing toll roads, the cost of rolling through a booth is rising to make up for declining traffic as the economy worsens.

For the first time in the Maine Turnpike’s 61-year history, state officials said, tolls collected in 2008 were lower than in the previous year. To offset the decline, turnpike officials recently ordered a toll increase that wasn’t due until next year.

“We held our own over the summer, but then we started to see monthly declines in traffic of 6%  and 8%,” said spokesman Dan Paradee. The Ohio Turnpike also recently raised tolls, as did Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And in West Virginia, turnpike officials have begun a campaign to convince the public to accept higher tolls that they said they hope to have in place by July 1.

As tolls on existing roads are rising, states are eyeing opportunities to add tolls to free interstates.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) said last month that he was making “overtures” to federal officials about changing the rules that keep states from levying tolls on existing interstate highways.

“What I would love to see,” Patrick told a radio interviewer, “is . . . border tolls at all of the interstate entrances . . . In other words, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York.”

Patrick commented in the interview on Jan. 23, the day after the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority delayed a vote on a proposed toll increase.

In December, Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell (D), chairman of the National Governors Association, said he and other governors planned to press the Obama administration to lift all restrictions against tolls on existing interstates.

In Rhode Island, a state committee studying ways to support the highway system said the state should consider tolling I-95, while Connecticut officials are also considering placing tolls on that road.

In deficit-strapped Kansas, legislation has been introduced to do away with the turnpike authority and allow the state government to use toll revenue.