Flashback to 2009: A Wider View of the U.S. Transportation Funding Crisis

In January 2009, IBTTA Executive Director and CEO Patrick D. Jones shared some reflections on highway funding at the annual meeting of the U.S. Transportation Research Board. His thinking is just as pertinent and relevant five years later, as legislators weigh the possibility of lifting the ban on Interstate tolling.

Also in 2009, astronomers had discovered that the galaxy was much larger than they’d originally thought, prompting the New York Times to editorialize on the difficulty of seeing problems clearly when we’re right in the midst of them.

Here are some excerpts from Jones’ presentation.

According to an editorial in the New York Times, “These new observations remind us of a basic problem in understanding the galaxy that we live in. We cannot get a view from outside it. We are essentially blinded to the structure and motions of the Milky Way by the fact that we live within it.”

“We can see how the neighbors live…in Andromeda…because we can see the whole galaxy in the distance, even with the naked eye on a dark, clear night. There is no looking back at the Milky Way. We can only guess at ourselves by observation, extrapolation, and analogy.”

We in the United States are essentially blinded to the most effective transportation policies and funding strategies that could work here in America.

It is difficult for us to see clearly and appreciate alternative means of funding and operating our highway system. 

The equivalent of the Interstate highway system in Western Europe is an integrated network of toll roads operated by a collection of different and diverse private sector concessionaires.

The notion of converting the Interstate highway system to toll roads—and the further notion of allowing private sector concessionaires to operate those roads—is anathema to many people in this country. 

[But as of 2009,] the 20 countries that are part of ASECAP, the European toll road association, collect about $30 billion a year in tolls on a network that is just under 18,000 miles of highways. 

Germany alone collects over $4 billion a year in tolls on heavy trucks. That’s about half of what we collect in tolls in the entire United States.

So it’s difficult to look objectively at transportation policies in the U.S.—our Milky Way—even though the Andromeda Galaxy—Europe—burns quite brightly in the night sky, with very productive toll roads in the 20 ASECAP countries.

…There’s a close relationship between the size of a galaxy and the speed of the stars in that galaxy.

In a similar way, I would suggest that the speed of acceptance and adoption of tolling and road pricing in the U.S. translates into a much larger opportunity for tolling to play an important or even dominant role in the funding and operation of highways in this country. A couple of examples to support this suggestion:

First, a study by PB Consult for FHWA found that even though toll roads account for only 5% of all highway revenues in the U.S., toll roads have been responsible for 30 to 40% of new “high-end” road mileage over the past decade.

Second, at last year’s Transportation Research Board annual meeting, Johanna Zmud of NuStats reported on a study summarizing the findings from 110 different surveys looking at public attitudes toward tolling. The study found there is clear, majority support for tolling and road pricing. 

Another way to express this connection between expanding galaxies and highways is like this:

The opportunity for tolling and road pricing is much larger than we previously thought because the conditions and forces that are favorable to tolling are moving much faster than we previously believed.

Four years later, Congress is still looking for funding options to patch the Highway Trust Fund and pay for a long-term Surface Transportation Reauthorization bill. Although tolling still seems to be beyond their grasp, the President and the U.S. Department of Transportation clearly have it in their sights.

To get a complete picture of how fast the tolling universe is moving, click here to learn more about IBTTA’s 82^nd Annual Meeting and Exhibition, September 14-17, 2014 in Austin, Texas.