http://www.dallasnews.com/news/transportation/20150227-north-texas-lawmakers-take-aim-at-toll-roads-with-9-new-bills.ece
So here is the draft OpEd.
A recent, February 27th,
article in the Dallas Morning News, “3 lawmakers from
Collin County take aim at toll roads with 9 new bills” describes how
three Texas Representatives are proposing new legislation that would, if all
proposed bills were passed, eliminate toll roads in Texas over time. What the
legislators fail to understand is that there is really no sound economic
justification for their position.
There is a class of
goods and services that are, on efficiency grounds, deserving of public
provision. Economists call these public goods and they have very specific
characteristics. Parks, fireworks displays, national defense, education and
even anti-poverty programs all meet the criteria, but highways do not. Highways
are expensive to build and the people who benefit from their use are those who
use them. Back when paying a toll sometimes required drivers to wait several minutes
at rush hour to hand change to a toll collector in a booth, there was an
argument for using other funds to provide roads. However, new technologies make
toll collecting virtually costless, making it hard to argue that people who use
highways should not pay for their construction and maintenance. Arguing
otherwise is no different from arguing that the government should pay my cable
bill or for my shoes.
The legislators also
add that even if they cannot eliminate toll roads completely, they at least
want to end toll collection once the road is paid for. First off, we have to
realize that highways require routine maintenance and periodic reconstruction
and other improvements. But second, there are sound policy reasons to maintain
the tolls even after the highway is paid off.
When people decide to
get on a highway, they never consider how much their doing so will add to
congestion and slow everyone else down. The US suffers billions of dollars of
lost productivity and leisure every year because people are stuck in traffic,
but no one has any incentive to behave differently. As it turns out, however, tolls
set to complement current congestion conditions are an ideal way to solve this
problem as the value of time saved to commuters exceeds the money cost of the tolls
needed to reduce congestion to an efficient level.
Surprisingly, a well
thought out congestion toll system will come close to collecting the amount of revenue
necessary to pay for the highway’s long term construction and maintenance. What
Texas needs legislators to do is focus on changing the toll collection strategy
to a congestion toll system where tolls are set very low during low-use periods
and much higher when congestion is high. Doing so would simultaneously fund our
highways and also reduce commute times to the extent that drivers would gladly make
the time/toll trade off. This would be exactly the type of win-win legislation
that all legislators should be looking for.
