Congestion Pricing
Crowded roads make “congestion pricing” — varying the tolls to adjust to traffic conditions — attractive to affluent drivers in a hurry in some parts of the country. But very high tolls may lead to drivers choosing other roads.
Virginia imposed congestion pricing tolls late last year outside Washington, D.C., on I-66, in the wake of tolls in recent years on some lanes of I-495, I-95 and I-395, bringing howls from drivers who paid upward of $40 for a 10-mile ride at the height of rush hour.
Oregon is set to add congestion pricing on highways running through Portland later this year. And legislators in seven states already have filed bills for the 2018 sessions to impose more tolls, including the congestion pricing option. There may be still more tolls to come; many are governed by local authorities that don’t need state approval.
In Seattle, talks are starting about how to charge tolls on the State Highway 99 tunnel under its downtown. The tolls are scheduled to go into effect this year, but a long ramp-up period is expected once the state transportation commission settles on the fees. Proposals include tolls that would vary during the day, from $1 overnight to a top rate of $2.50 for an afternoon trip.
Electronic tolling has made collecting variable tolls faster and easier, with drivers often unaware of how much the transponder in their car is charging them as they whisk through high-speed toll lanes. The bill comes later.
A report by the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association showed the number of trips taken by drivers on tolls roads increased 14 percent, from 5 billion trips in 2011 to 5.7 billion in 2015. The association also noted a 20 percent increase in electronic tolling over that time period. The Federal Highway Administration, in a separate report, found a 9 percent increase in overall toll road mileage within the United States, from 5,400 miles in 2011 to 5,900 miles as of 2013.
Stephanie Kane, spokeswoman for the Alliance for Toll-Free Interstates, a consortium of trucking, transportation and consumer groups that opposes tolls, said nationwide, tolls go up on average 3.2 percent a year for ordinary vehicles and 3.6 percent for commercial vehicles. She calls them the “worst funding mechanism” for roads. “Once tolls are built, their price only goes up,” Kane said. She noted that tolls on the 514-mile Pennsylvania Turnpike, which opened in 1940 as the first long-distance limited-access highway in the nation, have gone up annually for nearly a decade.
“The thing about tolls is, they are inefficient,” she said, pointing to a Congressional Research Service report that said highway toll collection costs 8 to 11 percent of the amount collected, even with electronic tolling, which is more efficient than cash. Collecting the gas tax costs about a penny of every dollar it brings in.
Talking Tolls
Tolls usually are controversial. The new Jacksonville-area tolls in Florida followed a community information drive throughout 2017 in which the state Department of Transportation held more than a hundred meetings, presentations or outreach events so that no one would be surprised by the new fees, said Ray, the agency spokesman.
In cash-strapped Connecticut, lawmakers are considering reinstating tolls on roads that were scrapped in the late 1980s. A poll of Connecticut residents in late 2017 by Sacred Heart University, in Fairfield, found 56 percent of those surveyed supported reinstating tolls to help the state out of its budget crisis. More of those surveyed, 71 percent, supported legalizing and taxing marijuana.
So far, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, has been silent on whether he will propose tolls in his new state budget, which is due to the Legislature in February.
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