White House Agency Brings Benefits of Tolling Onboard

In any education or advocacy campaign, you know your facts are beginning to resonate and your arguments are gaining traction when powerful validators start to pick them up and make them their own.

After many years of building the evidence base, generating the front-line experience, and making the case, that’s exactly what’s happening for the tolling industry as the debate unfolds over a major federal infrastructure plan.

Last week, the powerful White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) released its economic impact assessment for a comprehensive, 10-year, $1.5-trillion public infrastructure program. The top-line analysis in the Council’s media release focused on big-picture issues—the impact of the infrastructure plan on GDP, project approval times, and jobs.

The full, 40-page report incorporates much of the knowledge and experience the tolling industry will bring to the table as the government works to put a solid, practical foundation under the plan.

Among the highlights:

• The CEA report makes an argument for more efficient environmental regulation that also spotlights the value of speeding up badly-needed highway projects by bringing on private investment backed by tolls. “The key costs associated with lengthy project completion times come in the form of delayed enjoyment of the benefits or value that the infrastructure would have provided had it been brought into service sooner,” it states.
• It recognizes the lack of price signals in public infrastructure investment that mutes the warning bells that should go off when demand is on the rise. “Because of this lack of supply response, we systematically experience excess demand, overuse, and congestion—as, for example, on many of our urban roads and highways.”
• The report points to congestion pricing as a way to make more efficient use of existing infrastructure assets and “allocate scarce capacity to its best uses.” It states that “using time-varied prices or tolls to govern access can increase efficiency and, in some cases, raise revenues needed to pay for operations and maintenance of these assets.”
• It acknowledges that reducing traffic congestion “may raise productivity”, and that a single highway interchange project can reduce travel times across an entire corridor.
• It pays attention to wider solutions that prevent congestion pricing from becoming a burden for low-income highway users. “Using toll revenues to improve other travel options, particularly transit, can counteract this distributional effect,” even though “some evidence suggests that at least some low-income drivers in practice find tolled lanes worth paying for.”

“This is another notable moment on the road to a properly-funded surface transportation system,” said IBTTA Executive Director and CEO Patrick Jones. “Our members have been working very hard at this, at all levels—from the front-line agencies and vendors delivering results to millions of customers, to the policy people and advocates who’ve translated that experience into data and analysis.”

The results of our efforts are shining through at the local, state, national, and international levels. And now, an influential agency in the federal system seems to be recognizing the benefits of one of the leading tools in the transportation funding and financing toolbox.

To learn more about the funding and financing mechanisms that will help solve our critical infrastructure needs around the globe, register today for IBTTA’s Summit on Finance & Policy, July 22-24, 2018 in Portland, OR.