[Alberta's Child]

As a professional who works in transportation policy and planning I. will offer two observations:

1. Toll roads are a great idea in principle because they are a better “user pays” system than anything else out there today.

2. They often don’t work in practice because toll revenues rarely meet their protections over time. Too many motorists are so averse to tolls that they modify their driving patterns to avoid them.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

As an alternative, you can always replace the gas tax and tolls with a VMT, but then you would get into the privacy issues. The Cato Institute did come out with a policy paper on how you could institute a VMT while preserving the driver’s privacy. This was a number of years ago.

[MSF BU]

Projections and yes, sometimes drivers modify their driving patterns by leaving the state since typically the tolls are accompanied by a huge bureaucracy and a slew of other taxes and fees.

[BobL]

“2. They often don’t work in practice because toll revenues rarely meet their protections over time. Too many motorists are so averse to tolls that they modify their driving patterns to avoid them.”

I think part of the problem with revenue projections result from the fact that the people making those projections don’t really understand the politics behind tolling, particularly how new ‘revenue engines’ (a little toll road lingo, by the way) often become piggy banks for other causes.

So the tolls have to be higher, the traffic further drops, and the net result is that you have taken a perfectly good good highway partially out of service.

I still remember the attempt to put tolls on I-80 in Pennsylvania about 15 to 20 years ago. The system was all set to start as Congress had approved several ‘Demonstration Projects’ to show the country the wonders of tolling our Interstates. But Congress had one little clause: Revenue collected from the new tolls could ONLY be used for maintenance and upgrades of THOSE highways (i.e., actual ‘user pays’, in this case, rather than the usual middle class tax increase disguised as tolls).

Guess what, Pennsylvania WALKED AWAY from the plan once they found out that they would be held to that clause...just wasn’t worth the effort to them to set tolls so low because then they’d have to explain the sky-high tolling rates on the PA Turnpike...where most of its ‘revenue’ money is now diverted for non-Turnpike uses.

[Elsie]

Let me add a third.

Tolls are a GREAT way of taxation without representation to travelers THRU the state!

This is not toll related, but when I travel west; on I70 from Indianapolis; I make sure I've enough gas so I do NOT have to buy it in Illinois!