Obfuscation: AAA’s oll bashing tackled

Tolls have a long and an honorable history as the means of financing the great roads, bridges and tunnels of the world. Tolls are traced back to the Assyrians and were the basis for roadbuilding in the rennaisance and through the industrial revolution in Europe and North America. Countries like France, Italy and Japan have built their entire motorway systems on tolls. In America we pioneered superhighways with the Pennsylvania Turnpike and all our major bridges and tunnels were financed as toll facilities. Gasoline taxes by contrast are less than 70 years old and are used only in the United States as a means of financing roads. Only here has an effort been made to link roads spending to gasoline taxes and registration fees via highway trust funds. And a flawed effort it has been. A few states successfully retain highway taxes for highways. At the federal level a large slab of the money is diverted to rail. The Clinton administration is corrupting the system even more by using motorists’ monies to fight roads.

This makes it amazing that the AAA and other highway user groups are such one-eyed propagandists for the taxes and such virulent opponents of the tolls. AAA the major organization purporting to represent American motorists seems to be stepping up its anti-toll roads propaganda. An article published in a number of different club MOTORIST newspapers early this year by James Kolstad, VP for Public and Government Relations at AAA attacks tolling in specially vicious fashion. Main focus of the attack is the TEA21 provision for tolling on three interstates, and proposals for tolling some older interstates in AK, PA and GA. The sheer unscrupulousness and mendacity of the Kolstad article make it worthy of a detailed critique.

“These are highways already paid for by fuel taxes and other user fees,” writes Kolstad. But a road is never ever paid for. Roads need to be operated and maintained and rebuilt. The roads paid for by past fuel taxes etc are the roads that we have, which in many cases need major rebuilding, and the pertinent question that the Kolstads overlook is: “What do we do about the 30 and 40 year old roads that need rebuilding?” And how best to finance the rebuilding of them now.

Kolstad says that extra money coming from the feds “should make it possible” for states to improve their roads “without imposing an additional tax in the form of tolls.” An additional “tax”? Kolstad misuses words and besmirches tolling with this semantic dodge. Just as you pay a price for admission to a movie theater to recompense the owner for the costs of building the movie theater and putting on the film, your toll is a price for admission to a toll road or bridge, without which that toll road or bridge would not have been built or maintained. It is NOT a tax. A tax is a compulsory government charge imposed without a specific good or service in return for its payment.

“Should be able...”

Now of course a lot more road SHOULD in theory be able to be gotten out of the highway tax dollar, as Kolstad suggests. Major amounts are diverted to subsidize transit which could be better spent on roads. Transit which provides 2% of the nation’s surface passenger-miles traveled gets over 20% of government outlays, most of them paid by motorists. Davis-Bacon laws going back to the 1930s when white construction workers sought to exclude black competition are now used to force contractors to pay a wage scale laid down by the US Department of Labor, often 20 and 30% above going wage rates. Federal money comes with strings, requiring expensive and repetitive planning procedures and standards that often make no sense. Projects have to be pidgeonholed and funds matched. Monies are withheld in order to force state compliance with federal environmental fiats. There are major administrative costs collecting the taxes and considerable crime committed in evading them. But this has all been happening for many years and continues to happen despite the best lobbying that Kolstad and his colleagues can do in Washington DC to stop federal policies from disadvantaging road users through diversion and waste. The inadequate roads we get are what the present governmental and political system produces and Kolstad saying there “should” be enough isn’t going to produce a single dollar more for roads or pave another square foot of road, or get anything more for the motorist dollar.

To say as Kolstad then does that the AAA has “opposed tolls as a form of double taxation” since 1936 is no argument. That policy was not in the interests of motorists in 1936 and it isn’t now, because a better road system will be obtained through the toll mechanism and through self-financing roads than through reliance on the whims of politicians and bureaucrats and the tax monies they deploy to their own advantage first, to the advantage of special interests second, and motorists third, if they are lucky.

Safety slander

The AAA rep says toll roads “create problems, not the least of which is safety.” This is a baseless slander, for to the contrary toll roads are the safest of roads. Almost invariably, and certainly on average, they have lower accident, injury and death rates per vehicle-mile traveled than freeways, and a small fraction of the carnage of most ‘free’ roads.

He says further: “Toll booths become congestion-causing choke points, delaying emergency vehicles and creating additional air pollution as the result of long lines of idling vehicles.” Now badly sized or managed toll plazas can indeed cause congestion, just as badly sized and managed signalized intersections can, or a freeway which drops a lane, or any number of deficiencies in an unpriced road. There is nothing inherent in toll collection, especially in an age when transponders can be used to collect tolls electronically, which causes congestion or air pollution. To the contrary tolling allows highway managers the flexibility to readily raise money to remedy deficiencies, whereas without tolls they have to fight long political battles to get tax monies. Most promising of all, as demonstrated on CA91X and San Diego’s I-15 variable tolls offer a very promising way of managing traffic volume for the benefit of motorists such that stop-&-go traffic can be avoided and similar volumes carried at a safe and comfortable 55mph average speed as crowded freeways carry at 25mph average. AAA reps seem entirely ignorant of these revolutionary developments.

Kolstad’s suggestion that emergency vehicles get delayed by tolls is a scurrilous libel. Fire ambulance and police are always exempt from tolls and all toll agencies have arrangements to get them by toll plazas expeditiously.

Too few ICs

Kolstad complains too that toll roads “provide few entrances and exits.” So do freeways designed for long distance traffic. But extra entrances and exits can, and are, being built on many toll roads where appropriate. Toll collection technology now makes it possible to operate a toll road without major on-site toll collection, and liberates toll roads from the economics of large toll plazas. Toll road interchanges can now be as close-spaced as the designer wishes. On Toronto’s 407 toll road entrances and exits are an average of a little more than mile apart (29 interchanges in 42 miles), so close that entry and exit ramps of adjacent interchanges are in some places grade separated in so-called basketweave bridgings.

The AAA rep complains too that motorists on toll roads are often “locked in to” higher priced gas stations, restaurants and other services. There’s some truth to that charge, and many toll agencies are concerned about it, and others need to be.

Kolstad concludes by saying that American motorists “have paid hundreds of billions of dollars in gas taxes to support the interstate highway system” and that “They shouldn’t be asked to pay again...”

That is disgraceful demagoguery that an AAA representative should be ashamed to mouth. Of course motorists have to pay again. No road is built forever. No road can be maintained without debris collection, without snow plowing, without cleaning out drains, without restriping lane markings, without replacing bent guardrails, without careful attention to signage, or without paying for electricity to light it. The pavement and bridges highways deteriorate every day from the pounding of traffic and the extremes of temperature, from rust and chemical breakdown of steel and asphalt and concrete. There needs to be an active ongoing program to rebuild bridges and replace broken down pavement, so of course we motorists have to “pay again.”

The policy issue is not how the roads have been financed in the past. That’s history, an academic issue. What’s best for motorists now and in the future is what the AAA should be concerned about, and a dispassionate analysis will show that tolls rather than taxes are the way to go, in rebuilding, maintaining, extending and improving our roads.

AAA lobbyists do its members a serious disservice by this misguided and dishonest propaganda against tolls. It leaves quite unreformed a corrupt system of taxes and bureaucracy that rips off motorists. The AAA stance seems only explicable in terms of the organization’s lobbyists in Washington DC having a career vested interest in the present system. Their membership doesn’t, but then the membership is probably there for the AAA’s maps, its breakdown assistance and other practical services. Their dues are being misused in Washington DC.