The Trouble with Tolling

Pennsylvania lawmakers are looking to add toll booths to I-80, a free northern route across the state, that runs parallel to a tolled southern route (the Pennsylvania Turnpike). If they're successful, The Keystone State would join the ranks of Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey as the only states with no toll-free interstate options border to border.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission's aim is to capture revenue "lost" as drivers - especially truckers - use I-80 instead of the turnpike, a spokesman told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Tolling of existing Interstate highways is simply wrong and represents double taxation. Turning highways into cash cows for individual states is unfair to the highway users who have paid for the construction and maintenance of these roads through the payment of fuel and excise taxes. Federal fuel taxes have been the preferred funding method of the Interstate Highway System since its establishment in 1956. Often toll revenue doesn't even end up funding highway projects. In Pennsylvania a portion of toll revenues were going to the Philadelphia transit system.

Imposing tolls on existing lanes of the Interstate System would have a devastating effect on the trucking industry, which delivers almost 70 percent of our nation's freight tonnage and virtually all consumer goods. The trucking industry is highly competitive and it is extremely difficult to pass the cost of tolls along to shippers. A shipper in California doesn't understand why they're being charged for a toll in Pennsylvania. Motor carriers currently pay a federal diesel fuel tax of 24.4 cents per gallon (which is 33 percent higher than the federal gasoline tax that passenger vehicles pay), a 12 percent excise tax on new tractors and trailers, an annual vehicle use tax of up to $550, and a tax on tires.

In 2006 commercial vehicles paid a total of $17.8 billion in federal highway user taxes, or approximately 45 percent of all federal highway user fees. In addition, trucks paid $19.6 billion in state user fees. Imposing an even greater tax burden through tolls would be both unfair and inequitable.

In addition, toll collection requires a large and extremely expensive bureaucracy, even when high-tech methods are used. On major toll roads, toll collection costs as much as 33 percent of the revenue collected, and are essentially nothing but an inequitable and inefficient tax. In contrast, fuel tax administrative costs are only 1 percent to 2 percent of revenue generated. Fuel taxes are the least expensive, most efficient source of highway funding available today. Other systems such as tolling cannot come close to offering taxpayers that efficiency. That's why the trucking industry is willing to pay more in fuel taxes, as long as the added revenue is dedicated to highway infrastructure.

Mandatory tolls reveal two classes of drivers: those who can afford to pay a toll and those who cannot. And they cause diversion of traffic to other, often less safe roads. In Ohio tolls were raised on the Turnpike, and then significantly reduced upon finding that large numbers of trucks were using parallel non-tolled routes that were less safe than the Turnpike.

In May, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced legislation (S.1115) that would prohibit states, private entities and private-public partnerships from adding tolls on existing federal highways, bridges or tunnels built with federal funding. The American Trucking Associations supports Sen. Hutchison's efforts to eliminate double taxation on our Interstate system.

Tolling is an effective way to fund new routes that add additional capacity and travel options, but it does not provide a long-term solution for funding our existing highway infrastructure. The simple answer for increasing trust fund revenue is to increase the federal fuel tax.

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