Jump-start road repairs with tolls
The president-elect would do well to study a Pennsylvania proposal that would have gone a long way toward jump-starting repairs of aging infrastructure and providing relief for the state budget.
The president-elect would do well to study a Pennsylvania proposal that would have gone a long way toward jump-starting repairs of aging infrastructure and providing relief for the state budget.
And it would have done so without mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren.
The Pennsylvania plan was to raise the tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and add tolls to Interstate 80. The combination would have raised an estimated $700 million a year for infrastructure and maintenance of highways in the state.
Unfortunately, political and commercial forces conspired to keep the federal government from giving the state permission to toll I-80. That left the turnpike to bear the burden and made the math unworkable.
So I-80 will continue to be a "free" corridor to the Port of New York and New Jersey, while those wishing to use the Philadelphia ports will pay ever-increasing tolls, undermining the competitiveness of Philadelphia.
I put free in quotes because this corridor is not free. Pennsylvania taxpayers, who spend more than $100 million a year maintaining Interstate 80, are in fact subsidizing the Port of New York and New Jersey. Why Philadelphia-area business and labor leaders did not fight this is a puzzle to me.
This brings me to the solution available to the federal government and the states: letting the states toll all of the interstate highways within their borders.
Doing so would allow for much of our infrastructure spending to be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis. Instead of higher taxes, we would charge user fees.
Pennsylvania spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year just on the maintenance of the interstate system, which includes not only I-80, but also I-95, I-81 and others. Tolls would cover maintenance and free up that money for other vital needs. And much of the necessary funding for more infrastructure could be funded from excess cash flow, either directly or as debt service on bond issues.
One precaution: The funds generated would have to be restricted to infrastructure, so politicians don't find creative ways to spend the tolls on other projects.
And, of course, there are other benefits that could flow from the new tolls. They would, for example, encourage more people to use mass transit.
Every state has within its borders interstate highways that have long since been paid for. But they are spending billions of dollars in revenue to maintain these highways, and it's a burden they can ill afford. By allowing the states to toll these highways, the next administration could solve some of our economic problems.
