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.
The Value-Added Tolling concept calls for a new model that would apply to newly tolled highways such as rebuilt interstates. Its aim is to make such tolling a true highway user fee, not a hybrid of toll and tax, and to respond positively to long-standing concerns of highway user groups. The five policies are as follows:
- Limit the use of toll revenues to the tolled facilities;
- Charge only enough to cover the capital and operating costs of the tolled facilities;
- Begin tolling only when construction or reconstruction is finished;
- Use tolls to replace—not supplement—existing fuel taxes.
- Provide a higher level of service for tolled Interstates.
These policies are explained in some detail in the Reason study, which was released last week. You can download it from http://reason.org/files/value_added_tolling.pdf.
The Value-Added Tolling study has already begun to stimulate serious discussion among highway user groups. It urges both sides in the debate over tolling—advocates such as state DOTs and tolling organizations as well as skeptical highway user groups—to consider whether these policies would provide a practical way forward to unleash needed investment in the trillion-dollar project of rebuilding and modernizing the Interstate highway system. Congress could make expansion or mainstreaming of the current pilot program to all 50 states conditional on the incorporation of Value-Added Tolling principles.
There is a new bipartisan bill in the Senate, the Highway Innovation Act of 2014, to give states increased tolling flexibility. Introduced by Sen. Mark Kirk (R, IL) and Mark Warner (D, VA), it would expand the three-state tolled reconstruction pilot program to ten states and allow all 50 states to participate in the Value Pricing Pilot Program. But the safeguards in the current reconstruction pilot program are far less robust than those proposed under Value-Added Tolling.
How to Mislead with Transit Data
Nearly all major newpapers around the country on March 10th proclaimed this news: the use of public transit last year reached its highest level since 1956. The somewhat breathless New York Times story read like a news release from the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), including the claim from APTA president Michael Melaniphy that “We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how people are moving about their communities.” As far as I could tell, the only transportation reporter who did some independent homework on this story was USA Today‘s Larry Copeland, who got some very useful context from commuting expert Alan Pisarski.
So what’s the real story here? First, as academics David King, Michael Manville, and Michael Smart pointed out in an op-ed in the Washington Post 10 days later, although total transit trips have risen since their nadir in 1972, so has population. Even just between 2008 and 2012 they pointed out, average transit trips per capita have declined from 35 to 34. And transit consultant Thomas Rubin noted that since 1956, the population has increased by 85%. So if 2013’s 10.65 billion trips now equal those of 1956, the annual average trips per capita has shrunk by nearly half, from 62.5 to 34.
But it gets worse. Cato’s Randal O’Toole looked into the 2013 transit trip numbers and found that the increase in transit trips in New York City was 123 million. But the total national increase, as reported by APTA, was just 115 million. In other words, apart from New York City, there was no increase at all, on average, across the country. APTA quickly responded that some other individual cities did have increases, but in fact most experienced decreases.
And there’s more, undercutting the idea that a “fundamental shift in how people are moving about” is taking place. In a March 20th piece at NewGeography.com, demographer Wendell Cox analyzed commuting data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Here are the actual increases and decreases in daily one-way commuting trips from 2007 to 2012:
- Drive alone: +1,506,000
- Work at home (including telecommuting): +467,000
- Transit: +253,000
- Carpool: -812,000
- Other: +189,000
In 42 of the 52 major urban areas, the increase in working at home exceeded the increase (if any) in transit use.
In short, there is no meaningful shift to transit evident in the data. What we have here is a case of what statisticians call “torturing the data until it confesses” to the desired answer.
Originally published in Bob Poole’s Surface Transportation Newsletter.