Value-Added Tolling: Getting to "Yes" on Interstate Tolling

The Interstate highway system is wearing out. Over the next two decades, nearly all of its 47,000 miles will have to be rebuilt, to make it serviceable for another 50+ years. In addition, several hundred major interchanges are horrible bottlenecks and need to be replaced with more modern designs, and some corridors need additional lanes to cope with growth, especially in truck travel. A major Reason study last year estimated the cost of Interstate reconstruction and modernization at $1 trillion.

That sum is far beyond what current federal and state highway funding can provide. Congress some years ago created a pilot program to let states reconstruct three aging Interstates using toll finance. Those pilot projects would be exceptions to current federal law that bans tolling on existing non-tolled Interstates. Three states won slots in the pilot program, but so far none has gained political consensus to proceed with any toll-financed reconstruction.

Highway user groups have been leery of opening the door to Interstate tolling, despite the lack of alternatives to pay for Interstate reconstruction and modernization. They are afraid that state DOTs would jump at the chance to bail out all their highway and transit programs on the backs of Interstate highway toll-payers, rather than just rebuilding their Interstates. And Congress fears taking on the powerful trucking industry and its new anti-tolls coalition (Alliance for Toll-Free Interstates), even though many state DOTs are urging Congress to give them tolling flexibility.

Reason Foundation’s new policy brief, “Value-Added Tolling,” outlines a new way forward in this debate. It calls for tolling advocates to listen to highway users’ concerns and take them seriously in crafting a set of safeguards that would make next-generation tolling a true (and pure) highway user fee, not a cash-cow to solve a state’s overall transportation needs.

Two of the concerns still raised by the trucking coalition are being made obsolete by the technology of all-electronic tolling (AET). First is the legacy toll roads’ problems of congestion, emissions, and collisions at toll plazas. But all new toll roads and bridges (including rebuilt and tolled Interstates) will have no toll plazas at all, being designed from the outset for AET. The second concern is the high cost of toll collection. On legacy toll roads with cash and early forms of electronic tolling, collection costs ate up 20-30% of toll revenue, compared with 2 to 5% of fuel tax revenue needed for collection. But brand new toll roads, designed from the outset for AET, and a using a streamlined business model built around what AET can do, are already achieving collection costs as low as 5% of toll revenue (see http://reason.org/news/show/myths-toll-and-gas-tax-collection).

Four legitimate concerns of highway users, based on their experiences with legacy toll roads, are as follows:

1. No value added, with tolling simply becoming an additional cost of a highway. That was evident in a number of previous state proposals to toll Interstates.
2. Diverting revenues to other uses. A number of high-profile toll agencies (mostly in the Northeast) fund other highways, mass transit, canals, public buildings, and economic development out of toll revenues.
3. Double taxation. On all current toll roads, users continue to pay existing fuel taxes in addition to the tolls.
4. Diverting traffic to parallel routes. This is always true to some extent, but is much worse when toll rates are high in order to pay for more things than the toll road.