A recent email from our state senator, Jake Corman, notified me that today, June 1, is the last day for us to get in our comments on funding options that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation wants to use to fill our transportation funding gap. One of those funding options already received the necessary board approval back in November 2020, during the dark days of the pandemic.
The approval was to toll nine bridges on interstate highways around the state. Six of those will directly affect Happy Valley residents as we try to drive east, west or south from here (a map and details of the proposed toll bridges are on this webpage).
Now maybe this tidbit got lost in all the pandemic news as we approached the least festive holiday season I’ve ever lived through, but when I saw Senator Corman’s email I certainly didn’t recall seeing any news that PennDOT would be tolling bridges on our interstate highways, because I would have been rightly upset. Upset because the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways was designed to be free of tolls.
In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt requested a feasibility study of building toll superhighways on routes he had drawn on a U.S. map. Congress then asked for a report on the study. President Roosevelt sent Congress the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads study, titled Toll Roads and Free Roads In 1939.
The study concluded that the toll superhighway network Roosevelt had envisioned could not support itself financially, but that what the country really needed was a toll-free express highway network. An additional report titled Interregional Highways refined this toll-free express highway vision and was sent to Congress, which prompted Congress to include a provision in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 calling for a “National System of Interstate Highways.”
When the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 established a construction program, including a funding mechanism, our toll-free interstate system as we know it was born.
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe our interstates should stay toll-free.
Granted, there are a few tolls on the interstate system. In the early days, because of existing or planned turnpikes in corridors where it wanted interstate highways, Congress decided to include some turnpikes in the interstate system. In the ensuing years it allowed additional turnpikes for other reasons. As of today approximately 2,900 miles of the 46,876-mile interstate system includes turnpikes. But it is the exception and not the rule.
In addition, since the inception of the interstate system there have been some allowances made for toll bridges on interstates. In 1986 when I moved to Florida, I-95 had two toll bridges around Jacksonville. However, once the construction cost of those bridges had been recovered, the tolls were removed and remain off today.
So why the need to put tolls on nine interstate bridges that already exist in Pennsylvania?
You can read the details in the Executive Summary of PennDOT’s study here, but the driving reason is PennDOT’s budget for highways and bridges is $6.9 billion. They say they need $15 billion to maintain our highways and bridges. That’s a shortfall of $8.1 billion that they suggest will grow to $12.6 billion in the next 10 years. The options they looked at to close that gap were:
- Increasing sales taxes on a variety of products
- Increasing personal income taxes
- Increasing real estate and property taxes
- Increasing gas taxes
- Increasing a variety of other taxes and fees
- Instituting a Mileage Based User Fee by charging drivers to use roadways by miles driven
- Implementing various forms of tolling – bridge, managed lanes, congestion pricing, and full interstate
After looking at all these options they decided the fastest ways to get more money was to toll bridges, and/or institute managed lanes with tolls on some highways – for example express lanes or encouraging carpooling with free high occupancy vehicle lanes and tolls for others. As I mentioned, bridge tolling has already received the first step of approval.
The six bridges that will directly affect those of us in Happy Valley – two eastbound on I-80, two westbound on I-80, one on I-83 in Harrisburg, and one eastbound on I-78 — will start charging $1 to $2 tolls per vehicle if you have an EZ-Pass, and more if they have to send you a bill by using a “Toll-by-Plate” system.
The catch is that trucks would be charged much more, which creates a little issue with the No. 1 selling point for bridge tolling: only those who use the bridge pay for the bridge. That is technically true because the truck used the bridge so the truck paid the toll. Except if that truck was carrying goods that you eventually buy, the increased cost to get those goods to you is going to be passed along to you. So you did use the bridge and pay for it – you just might not have known it.
I could go on about a few other concerns regarding bridge tolling: it’s not very cost-effective as the expenses associated with getting the money are high compared to other options; how any excess revenue from the tolls would be handled – they “propose” it’ll be used for other projects nearby; and there’s no mention of removing the toll after needed funds are raised.
But the one thing I notice in this funding gap study is that all the focus on closing the gap is on the top line: increasing revenue. Isn’t there any way the middle lines – expenses – can be reduced to help close that gap? One glaring example that sticks out on the website is that they show that Pennsylvania’s road system is comparable in size to New York, New Jersey and all the New England states combined. Well, that’s a lot of roads. Is it possible that PennDOT has too many roads to manage? Maybe some should be closed, or passed off to local governments for them to maintain.
In any case, maybe you are like me and hadn’t heard of these efforts to toll some bridges on our interstate highways. Well, you have now, and if you feel strongly one way or the other, today is the time to let your voice be heard. Get your comments in by emailing PennDOT at [email protected], or go to this page, scroll to the bottom, and enter your thoughts. Take part in democracy!
