More Support for Expanded Use of Tolling

Jeff Shane has written a spirited defense of tolling in National Journal’s Expert Blog on Transportation. Jeff was the Under Secretary for Policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation in the last presidential administration and is now a partner with Hogan and Hartson LLP. He notes that there is an “essential hostility to private equity that continues to pervade U.S. transportation law.” He also says federal law stipulates that “any highway facility that has been built with federal financial assistance ‘shall be free from tolls of all kinds.’”

Shane continues with this powerful statement: “We need to be very clear about this in the run-up to the reauthorization of America’s surface and air transportation programs: Federal law today severely restricts the flexibility available to our states and communities in their efforts to address mobility issues. None of them knew that participation in the historic federal transport infrastructure programs that propelled the U.S. economy for so many decades was actually a Faustian bargain, that they were in fact signing up for indefinite micromanagement of their transportation solutions by Washington.”

Wow! Thanks, Jeff, for putting the issue in such stark terms. Ed Regan of Wilbur Smith Associates made a similar observation nearly four years ago during a Forum on the Future of Highway Transportation in America. At that time, Ed said “Many states are looking at tolls to rebuild. But federal restrictions on the ability of states to put tolls on existing Interstate highways is one of the biggest barriers to that rebuilding process. So the Federal Government, while not supplying solutions in terms of funding, still refuses to get out of the way and allow tolling as an option for the states to use.”

Thanks, Jeff and Ed, for continuing to advance a thoughtful reexamination of America’s national policy toward tolling.

-- Pat Jones