My enlightened colleague over at the newly-redesigned Brainville, Erik, has posted on an apparent new wave in toll roads that may sweep the United States in the future. He couldn't recall where he saw the news, but my impressive powers of external logic can:
Legislation lifts taboo on U.S. highway tolls
Congress and the White House are still fighting over how much to spend on highways, but they have resolved a 182-year-old dispute of more practical significance to most drivers, especially commuters stuck in traffic. The great taboo against tolls has ended.
The legislators who approved the highway bill Friday faced the same basic problem as the Congress of 1822, when the federal highway system consisted of a gravel road from Cumberland, Md., to the Ohio River that was said to be in "a ruinous state."To pay for repairing the National Road, Congress proposed charging tolls, but President James Monroe vetoed the bill and set an enduring precedent.
Of course, he may have been of the mind that the United States of America shouldn't be in the business of road construction, upkeep, and administration. Maybe.
Although some states later built toll roads, such as the Pennsylvania and New Jersey turnpikes, the federal government kept tolls off its roads through the 20th century. It required new stretches of the interstate system to be free, a policy long popular with drivers but now blamed by many transportation experts for decrepit highways and worsening traffic jams.
House leaders have proposed increasing the federal gas tax, now 18 cents, by a nickel, or at least indexing it to inflation, but the Bush administration has opposed any tax increase. Attempts to increase the tax at the state level also have proved unpopular in referendums.
The gasoline taxes that finance highways have been yielding less and less revenue because they are not indexed to inflation and because today's cars use less gasoline per mile. To bring revenues back to the inflation-adjusted levels of four decades ago, the federal and local gasoline taxes would have to be doubled - an increase of 38 cents per gallon, which is not being considered.
Voluntary exchange is better than wealth redistribution through taxation. Even better would be complete voluntary exchange in all aspects of the road business. Meaning, let companies build as they see fit, which must respond and conform to market demands.
The White House now wants to relax the taboo, and the House went along Friday by passing a highway bill that encourages new express toll lanes and roads. Details of the House bill must be reconciled with the bill already passed by the Senate, but that version also encourages tolls.
New tolls, which traffic engineers have been promoting as the cure to congestion, once were considered political suicide because of longstanding opposition from automobile associations, truckers, bus companies and other industries. Their coalition, the American Highway Users Alliance, still lobbies fiercely against tolls on existing roads, but it endorsed the legislation permitting tolls on new lanes and roads.This change of heart was due partly to new technology, which allows tolls to be electronically collected via transponders in cars moving at expressway speeds, eliminating the need for tollbooths. The change also was an acknowledgment of fiscal reality: There seems to be no other way to pay for new roads.
Some critics complain that tolls create "Lexus lanes" that are used disproportionately by the affluent. Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., who opposed the toll provisions passed Friday, has warned that imposing tolls "could effectively close these roads to low-income workers" and said new roads should be financed instead through increases in the gasoline tax.
Others favor both financing options. "I'd like to see higher gasoline taxes along with tolls," said Robert Atkinson, vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the research arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council."As a Democrat, I look at tolling as a progressive tax system, because we can get higher-income people to pay tolls to build new roads, and lower-income people benefit without paying a cent because the existing free roads become less congested."
As a collectivist, I look at tolling as another method of forced wealth transfer, because we can coerce certain people with too much money to pay for new road construction that the state chooses to build without regard to the most effective use of said roads. Meanwhile, America's Next-Favorite Class can live off the loot we acquire for them and grow further complacent and dependent on the state for it's livelihood.
The House's highway bill would cost $275 billion, less than the $318 billion version passed by the Senate but still more than the White House's limit. President Bush threatened to veto any bill costing more than $256 billion, although both chambers appear to have enough support to override the president.Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company
By the way, the NYT article follows up on the Monroe Issue:
Tolls, incidentally, ultimately resolved the 19th-century battle over the National Road, which ran roughly along the present-day path of Route 40 between Cumberland and Wheeling, W.Va. After President Monroe vetoed any federal tolls in 1822, the road continued to deteriorate until a compromise was reached in the 1830's: The federal government transferred control of the road to the states, which then erected their own tollhouses.
(UPDATE 4/13/2004 1:31pm)
Looks like the Austin and Travis County areas are looking into this as well.
UPDATE 9/8/2004 9:01am
Austin Traffic Sucks? Really???
UPDATED 7/10/2006 11:15am
Ben Wear's Wily Hunt for Truth and the TxTag
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Nice article. But I'd say transportation subsidies are a redistribution of wealth from the taxpayers to the largest corporations. The main effect of highway subsidies is to underwrite the inefficiency costs of a centralized and concentrated economy, by allowing big business to externalize its distribution costs on the taxpayers. As a result, demand for transportation increases geometrically, far faster than new resources can be appropriated to expand the system.
Like most government intervention in the economy, this is an example of state capitalism.
Posted by: Kevin Carson on April 6, 2004 07:21 PMMr. Carson, you are correct of course. The wealth must first be transferred to the government contractors so they can build the roads that the people can benefit "for free."
Here in Austin, we've got a rapidly growing transportation problem because one of the primary arteries for trans-Mexican and trans-Canadian truck shipping is IH35. It cuts right through the center of the city, driving urban growth along a north-south axis. We have two semi-loops (MOPAC and Highway 183) that take some of the load off, but traffic grows at greater rates than highway expansion can handle. The politicians seek the same solutions to the problem, of course. ( http://www.drizzten.com/blargchives/000771.html )
Posted by: Drizz on April 7, 2004 08:44 AMI checked out the link, and your point is well taken. Here in Arkansas, the governor's highway plan consists of issuing bonds against the next twenty years of federal highway money, paying for a huge construction program up front, and then paying interest on it for twenty years. So not only are the taxpayers subsidizing the distribution costs of Tyson and Wal-Mart, they're paying interest charges to bloodsuckers as well. And since the state is dumping a huge amount of money into road construction all at once, it is probably at a disadvantage in the prices it pays contractors.
The closer we get to running government services on a cost basis, with the people who benefit from them paying pro rata user fees, the better. When you get down to it, government's main function is to externalize and redistribute costs from the privileged to the producing classes.
If you haven't read Oppenheimer's *The State*, I recommend it highly. Oppenheimer argued that the state throughout history had been an instrument of class rule throughout history, and that exploitation was impossible unless a ruling class acted through the state. The state, he said, was the organized political means of obtaining wealth by force, from those who had produced it by the economic means.
As a Georgist, Oppenheimer placed special emphasis on the role of the state in politically preempting access to land, and controlling access to it by the producing classes. By controlling labor's independent access to the means of production and subsistence, the state reduced the bargaining power of labor and forced it to sell itself in a buyer's market. Oppenheimer's understanding of these issues (especially statist land monopoly) had a big influence on Albert Nock. Although Rothbard didn't buy the Georgist part of it, he also thought highly of Oppenheimer's analysis.
Posted by: Kevin Carson on April 7, 2004 11:30 AM