DEBATE:‘No Tolls’ rep vs TRnl

NO TOLLS: What I was trying to say was that you’d been misled by the Tollway, not that you were deliberately deceiving...

TRnl: If I made mistakes I probably made them myself. Look the Tollway is quite incapable of making any propaganda. Its exec-director agrees with you. He’s working for a governor who says he wants to get rid of tolls. And others there have many....

NO TOLLS: But they are dragging their feet, offering excuses. Besides there are other people there sabotaging...

TRnl: other people at the Tollway have different personal opinions, some of them pro-toll of course, but there is no such thing as a Tollway position, and no one is sabotaging anything. My opinions are my opinions. There are some inconvenient facts like a billion dollars of Tollway debt remaining, and $320 million of toll revenues per year you have to make up. You don’t need to work for the Tollway to discover that.

NO TOLLS: Illinois has a annual budget of $46 billion dollars and is running surpluses of $1+ billion a year. Suddenly I’m not impressed by your numbers. Besides, almost half of that $320m goes to collect the tolls, and in administration. When you calculate the cost of removing tolls you fail to account for savings from the elimination of these costs.

TRnl: Look if the roads are run by the state DOT, there will be administration costs there too, probably as large if not larger. If you want to cut those, you’ll have to privatize. Toll collection on the Tollway costs $50m/yr, fifteen percent not fifty percent. 15% is too much, I agree, and they need to reduce it. They are doing that with I-PASS but too slowly and they need to do more. Over ten years they should be able to get toll collection costs down to 5%, but of course that could be partly by collecting serious tolls, not these dinky nickel and dime tolls...

NO TOLLS: And the toll system is running a surplus of $40m a year, and you would advocate raising tolls.

TRnl: Tolls should be raised to support the costs of rebuilding the system and upgrading it. The current toll rates of about 3c/mile are absurdly low for an urban toll system. It is also plain inefficient to be handling these nickels and dimes in coin machines. They are just a nuisance. Automatic coin tolls should be based on the new dollar coin and on quarters. ISTHA deserves a small round of applause for earning a small profit, not criticism. The tollway has major assets in the form of all that roadway infrastructure, say $2 billion worth, and it declares a profit of $40m, a 2% return. They should be earning a better profit that that. The taxpayers should be getting about four times that return...

NO TOLLS: The profits they run are out of our pockets. If the Federal Government advocated a 150% increase in taxes people would riot in the streets. We would demand to know why they wanted more of our money when we are running budget surpluses.

TRnl: Profits are what makes the world go round. But your comparison is screwy. Incomes tax revenues rise every year whereas the Illinois Tollway has had the same toll rates there for an age, and they buy steadily less each year. If you want a better road system more quickly, rebuilt pavement, extra lanes etc it’s going to cost. Sure, ISTHA will need to justify any toll increases. I think they could if the politicians would butt out.

NO TOLLS: Let’s face it, tolls are the least efficient and most expensive way of paying for these roads and you know it.

TRnl: Raising large amounts of money from customers is always expensive and difficult. Taxes are difficult and expensive to collect too.

NO TOLLS: But not as expensive. Or as difficult to enforce. Everyone pays the gas tax. Have you ever heard of anyone having difficulty collecting agas tax?

TRnl: Disagree. Gas tax evasion runs at about 4%, diesel much higher. Organized crime in this country is sustained by (1) drug money and (2) gas/diesel tax money. It is a huge business falsifying gas tax certificates, fiddling with dyes, diverting heating oil to diesel tanks, off-road gasoline to on-road, and otherwise finagling the system to pass off untaxed fuels as taxed fuels. It’s a multi-billion dollar business. And it gets bigger every time you increase the gas tax. It’s a mafia staple. And lots of freelance criminals work quietly at it too.

NO TOLLS: I have never heard of that...

TRnl: Not that many people have. No tax bureaucrat wants to publicize any shortcomings in tax collection, and of course the crims don’t want publicity, so both sides in this war have a stake in keeping it quiet. Collecting taxes is very difficult and employs large armies of clerks and inspectors. This is nonsense that it is cheap and clean and easy.

NO TOLLS: As you describe the evils of the gas tax I see the Tollway. It too wishes to hide its true cost of collection. It too requires an army of collectors and administrators. Except now instead of one bloated inefficient bureaucracy we have two. And the Toll Authority is by far the worse.

TRnl: The efficiency of any state business outfit like ISTHA can be improved by putting its operations out to bid, as has been done very successfully by Florida’s Turnpike, OOCEA, E-470 and others. The existing employees could form a business unit to bid. Or you can privatize the lot, and subject it to commercial discipline. You won’t achieve anything by handing it over to another state agency. That would just require a quite large tax increase.

NO TOLLS: Every number I quote numbers I can give sources. And I never advocate a wholesale tax increase to pay for the roads that are now tolled.

TRnl: A gas tax increase would be at least 5c/gal. Do Illinois voters trust a bunch of politicians to spend that money on the roads? We’ll see. Actually the gas tax may prove to be the old-fashioned way of raising money for roads. There will be large increases in fuel efficiency in future, and we’ll get alternative fuels, hybrid motors, fuel cells that may not even use gasoline. So as less gas is used the yield of the gas tax will decline. It will bear no relation to what road needs to be built and maintained...

NO TOLLS: Then we will tax the batteries or we will tax the hydrogen, or we will tax what ever propulsion system they develop, but we should always pay for roads on the supply end. Despite the fraud and theft you say takes place in the gas tax it will always be easier to pay for roads in bulk on the supply side than individually on the end user side. This is why the gas tax doesn’t create lines and the tolls do. This brings me to my next point. Tolls equal congestion, just look at the toll lines. People won’t stand for it, and they are right.

TRnl: Agreed. Overloaded and poorly managed toll plazas can make for congestion, sure. But look at I-PASS EXPRESS (highway speed ET). Give these guys some credit. They have shown that tolls don’t have to mean even slowing down, let alone stopping. That’s the tolling of the future. It’s convenient, economical...

NO TOLLS: I-PASS is horrendously expensive. They have spent over $100m and they have only just started.

TRnl: Many of the changes at the toll plazas affect both cash tolling and electronic tolling. Contracts cover work on both, so it’s tough to disentangle. You talk very little about I-PASS. Perhaps that’s because it is very popular and you guys are desperate to take down tolling before people see it doesn’t have to mean sitting in lines and throwing coins.

NO TOLLS: Approximately 20% of tolls collected are processed through I-pass. We are dealing with ISTHA so let’s keep the realm of our debate confined to reality. The sad truth is the Authority is dedicated to the cash/ET system. As long as we have both there will be $30m dollar plazas that have tunnels under the express lanes so that the change makers can get from one side to the other. Under the current plans we are looking at 20 years to get any real benefit from I-Pass.

TRnl: It need not take anything like 20 years. But heck, you are the guys who threaten worse congestion. Take off tolls and you’ll increase traffic 10 or 15%. Regardless of the toll plazas the Illinois Tollway is close to capacity already. You’d add more traffic to it and push it over the edge, and you’ll also cut off a revenue stream that can be used to finance improvements and widening...

NO TOLLS: Where is this traffic coming from? Perhaps instead of avoiding the expressways people would get off the back streets and take the most efficient route. The aggregate commute time could actually decrease as the local roads are used for local traffic and the express ways are used for people traveling several miles. What a concept! Besides, fully deployed ET would have the same effect. If you take away the lines at the toll booths more people are going to ride the toll roads. It’s not about the forty cents. It’s about the unfairness of being the only citizens in the state whose expressways require them to sit in long line to pay a toll while burning gasoline that has been taxed to provide for roads.

TRnl: I don’t believe you have the capacity on local arterial roads to avoid the expressways. Arterials with traffic signals and local access have very little ability to move serious traffic at an acceptable speed.

NO TOLLS: Look the bottom line is that the people of Illinois are fed up with broken promises and the toll booths are a monument to the broken promises that the tolls would be taken down once the roads were paid for.

TRnl: The bottom line is that anyone who believed the promise that the roads would be paid for was a fool. Roads are never paid for. Pavement crumbles, bridges rust, drains clog, and the grass has to be mowed and light bills paid. A road is either paid for by tolls or paid for by taxes. It costs! It ain’t never free. Aren’t you guys in Chicago supposed to be realists about politicians? Politicians make absurd promises about what they can achieve just one year or two years off. Only a complete idiot would believe the promises of a politician about what will happen 25 years away. Politicians promising free roads were talking pure hokum.

NO TOLLS: We are realists about the pols. That’s why we oppose the Toll authority, because it’s run by them. At any rate, this is what people were promised and we’ll keep working to make them deliver for once...

(Contact Jeff Barnett 630 627 0517 www.notolls.org)