HERO:NJ’s Commissioner Weinstein defends tolls

He “personally opposed” moves to remove tolls on the Garden State Parkway, which all three then-contenders for the governorship – including his own boss, acting Governor Donald DiFrancesco – had in varying degrees endorsed in recent months.

‘’I think we have a model (with toll financing) that works. I think that the polls show that the people of this state who use the toll roads believe that paying by tolls is a good way to make sure their money goes toward road maintenance.”

‘’New Jersey led the country in this, and I think it works well,’’ Weinstein said, telling legislators that without the guarantee of toll revenue the money could never have been raised to build the whole great parkway in the first place.

‘’We have enough things in this state in transportation that don’t work. We should be devoting our time and attention to those that are not working (and forget this detoll proposal.)’’

Weinstein said the NJ Department of Transp, which manages non-tolled state highways has no way to fund maintenance of detolled facilities, or to fund needed rehabilitation or improvements. Moreover, he said abolition of tolls would reduce federal grants to New Jersey since money raised by tolls counts as a state credit in the allocation formulae.

He strongly opposes elimination of tolls, he said, though as a public servant he would of course do his best to implement anything that was determined by the governor and the legislature. As requested by the acting governor Weinstein said he has ordered a comprehensive study of the costs and the possible savings from eliminating the New Jersey Highway Authority, the agency responsible for managing the Garden State Parkway, and its toll collectors.

Acting Governor DiFrancesco had said he would like to remove tolls from the Garden State Parkway because they are a “nuisance” and asked for the study. He acted largely in response to a noisy anti-toll campaign by his rival for Republican loyalties and declared Independent, Bret Schundler, who is presently the major of Jersey City. Schundler says he doesn’t care how the shortfall in revenue will be made up. He will demolish the toll plazas and worry about finances afterward.

“Citizens Against Tolls”

An anti-tolls movement headed up by Raymond Neveil, a retired Bell system executive and a core of five dedicated others on the Jersey Shore has been working almost fulltime campaigning to abolish tolls on the GS Pkwy. Citizens Against Tolls (CAT) says it has 600 semi-active people and has 18,000 signatures on a petition. It is trying to get an anti-tolls pledge from all the candidates. Schundler is the only one to sign so far. The group has all the traditional methods such as bumper stickers, banners, t-shirts, a speakers group and lobbying. It also has an effective website www.endtolls.com and email broadcast system and an email forum operated by Jim Padykula a mapping technician on the Jersey shore. (Good guys, if wrongheaded!) They exaggerate the costs of toll collection and forget the cost and difficulties of gas/diesel tax collection. They overlook the value of tolls as a link between customers and the agency that serves them. They roundly denounce the parkway’s debt as if it is entirely the product of self-indulgence and self-perpetuation, when of course a goodly portion went to finance the construction of bridges, new lanes, pavement and interchanges which otherwise would not exist. They claim that net toll revenues could be offset by economies (some truth to that probably), increased funds from fiber optic rights (dead wrong, a dying market) and earnings from service areas (not much) and more federal funding (most unlikely, could actually reduce fed-$s), and possibly, as a last resort only, of course, a “weeny” (love that word) 3c gasoline tax increase (followed certainly by more ‘weeny’ increases about every several years like in Connecticut where earlier CATs won out.)

The Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jim McGreevey initially joined the anti-toll feeding frenzy, asserting he too would remove tolls. His staff was working on a plan. More recently the Dem has edged away from any hard detolling commitment saying he would remove tolls “if” studies showed this was financially feasible. He has lately sounded a note of fiscal prudence saying he would do nothing on tolls that would damage the state’s credit standing or seriously increase its debt.

After Weinstein’s bold statement – IBTTA should give this guy a big fat gold medal and a prime place in the Toll Hall of Fame – the anti-toll campaign sagged noticably. Newspapers and others supported Weinstein and very few criticized him. Assemblyman Alex DeCroce (R-Morris), chairman of the transp committee has been a consistent supporter of tolls, and has said the road would “go to hell” if it lost its dedicated funding scheme, but he never came out saying clearly like Weinstein in saying detolloing was a bad idea.

Interestingly the candidate who made detolling the Parkway an issue Mayor Bret Schundler now sees no political traction on the issue. He has been steadily de-emphasizing it in his campaigning. Amid about 100 statements, press releases and policy issues on his campaign webpage www.bret2001.com there is not a single mention of his stance against tolls. Opinion polls have indicated greater support for retaining tolls than for a gas tax increase to replace them, though CAT contests that.

GSPkwy exec Lou Thurston says he had a meeting with Schundler and that the mayor wanted to talk about “everything except tolls and the Parkway.”

In late April the acting Governor Donald DiFrancesco announced he was quitting the race for governor because of a favors-for-money scandal that was coming to a head. He was quickly succeeded as Republican establishment candidate by Bob Franks, a former congressman who was narrowly defeated in the last election in a run for the US Senate. Franks had not previously taken any position on tolls, but as candidate he says his policy is to appoint a bipartisan commission of inquiry into tolling.

His office provided us this emailed statement: “New Jersey Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Franks believes the Garden State Parkway’s conventional token collection system is a disaster for several reasons. First, toll plaza traffic wastes commuters’ most valuable resource – time. Second, toll plazas create dangerous traffic hazards and cause countless accidents every year. Third, the toll system is environmentally irresponsible because it creates unnecessary air pollution. Finally, the toll plazas are an extremely expensive way to raise money. It costs the Parkway at least 7 cents to collect a 35-cent toll. As Governor, I will create a bi-partisan commission to develop a better way to maintain the Parkway than our current antiquated toll system while at the same time ensuring our state’s fiscal health remains vibrant.”

In short Franks policy is get a broad range of views on how to modernize the toll system.

Lew Thurston exec-director of the NJ Highway Authority which is responsible for the Garden State Parkway says he’ll cooperate with any candidate: “This is a legitimate issue for public dialogue. We want to help it be an informed discussion so that people know what they are getting into. People should know there is no free road, just as there is no free lunch, but it is a legitimate question what proportion of road costs should be covered by taxes and what by tolls. We believe the user fee is well established in New Jersey. Tolls have played a major role (in financing highways) for over 50 years, and there has been widespread acceptance of that. But we’ll see.”

The bottom line is that anti-toll CAT group has only gotten one candidate Bret Schundler to sign the detoll-GSP pledge, and he is now downplaying the issue. At this point CAT don’t look like getting any more candidates to sign up. Expert review, modernization of toll systems and critical oversight of the authority look to be the smartest toll policies with the New Jersey electorate, as well as the right policies.

Conversation with NJ’s top detoller

The GS Pkwy remains politically vulnerable however to some unexpected random event or revelation. Some ghastly smash at a toll plaza, the unravelling of some serious corruption in the toll authority could radicalize the political environment. The authority has formidable political opponents. The chairman of CAT Ray Neveil is an engaging and forceful campaigner with a long list of examples of self-indulgence and extravagence, as he sees it, by the NJHA, many of which I can’t evaluate. He knows how to grab a reporter. In brisk but good conversational style he cites a dozen $130k+ salaries plus personal car, a lavishly fitted out breakroom for collectors at one ramp plaza, and a ‘fully staffed PR office’ and a glossy annual report. What other road spends money on a glossy annual report he asks? I start to argue: the New York State Thruway. Perhaps more roads need PR people, I say. If you want the guys who run the road to be responsive to their customers you’ve got to provide them information and listen to people’s complaints, evaluate them, decide where they are valid and not valid. If they are valid you try to get the outfit to change things. If they are invalid you explain that. You may need some specialists to do this stuff. Call ‘em PR guys.

Of course this public interaction can be badly done, or overdone, but in principle we probably need more of it?

I ask him if the Pkwy doesn’t provide better service than less staffed state DOT roads. He has dealt with that question many times, it is clear from his instant response: “One ninety five is just as pretty and just as well kept.” It happened that I had just driven I-195 having done the V-plan spin down the Pkwy MP-127 to MP-98 then west on I-195 to the NJ Tpk on the way home. Neveil is right that I-95 is a pretty road and well kept. It’s a link between the Jersey Shore and the state capital Trenton and the northern part of the Philadelphia area. But it is a minor highway in comparison with the Garden State Parkway, and lightly trafficked except at weekends because it caters mainly to weekender recreational and business traffic, few commuters. I-195 has 15 ICs, GSP has 91 ICs, I-195 is 60km (38mi) vs GSP 277km (173mi) long, I-195 is 4-lanes while large portions of GSP are 8, 10 and 12 lanes. 50k trips/day (a guess) vs a million? Not roads in the same league. Why shouldn’t the biggie, the Parkway have its own dedicated staff and financing? We disagree.

I was curious why CAT was focussing so totally on the GS Pwky while giving the Gross Pike, for example, a free ride, if it were truly an anti-tolls outfit rather than just a free-parkway one. Neveil hastens to tell me his group is against all tolls in the state, whether on the NJ Turnpike, the Atlantic City Exwy, the Delaware River bridges or the PANYNJ facilities – all of them. But he said “We are a volunteer group...” Only began in Oct 1999. One target at a time. Most of the CATs are from the Jersey Shore so naturally their first target is their tolls, their Parkway. It is also an easier target. There seems to be something about great big sprawling barrier plazas stuck across the whole width of the travel lanes that stirs anti-toll feelings in a way in which ramp plazas don’t. Perhaps the stop at the beginning and at the end of a journey on a trip toll system with its ramp plazas is less impact on the psyche than a barrier plaza? Perhaps in getting on and off the tollroad, where you may have traffic signals and local surface streets to contend with, the ramp plazas blend in better.

CAT has one effective little narrative on its website about how annoying it is to be cruising happily along the mainline and to then come upon the massive barrier plaza with its great clog of multiple laned backed-up idling vehicles...

But what about transponders and electronic tolling? E-ZPass, it’s a snare and a delusion, says Neveil, and there’s a book full of horror stories of misbillings etc. ET is “just another boondoggle” he says and a way of perpetuating tolls and all their associated waste. He says that half of motorists won’t get ET because of its problems. He thinks its mode share has peaked and may even decline as “people get disgusted with a system that doesn’t work as advertised.”

Finances

The Parkway has $620m in outstanding bonds and it has contractual obligations (a kind of contingent debt) under the Regional Consortium for deployment of E-ZPass. These form an immediate barrier to detolling. (A great big longterm debt obligation constitutes a formidable armor against the potshots of anti-toll demagogues!) Tolls at the GSP (35c cash and 33c tokens) bring in about $190m/year and other revenues about $30m. Toll collection costs about $40m or 21% of toll revenues and about 7c of the typical 35c toll. (CAT claims 13c or 33% and asserts it is moving up to 50%!) Policing costs are $25m, maintenance $40m and other administrative costs $30m for an operating surplus of $75m. About $55m of this goes for debt service, and there’s a small surplus which goes towards capital projects.

The Parkway does 1.6m tolls/ day catering to an estimated 1m trips. There are eleven mainline barrier plazas and 84 ramp plazas. That makes it the busiest single toll road in the US in terms of transactions. (The Illinois system does more transactions on its four tollroads.) The parkway’s basic pavement looks to be in good condition, but the NJHA has state DOT support for some $450m of capital improvements, the biggest of which is a $163m doubling and redecking of the Parkway’s major bridge, the Driscoll Bridge over the Raritan River at MP-128. Another is a $50m upgrade of the I-78 interchange near Newark airport with extra and wider ramps. (See p12) Outside this program is a 3rd laning of nearly 80km (50mi) of the parkway from Toms River MP-83 to Atlantic City MP-36. A bunch of eight interchanges in the middle section of the parkway in Ocean and Cape May counties are missing ramps, or have obsolete ramps. The NJHA has done designs and some of the permitting of new Ics. It sensibly has a policy of insisting on ramp tolls along with all such improvements. This has stirred up some anti-toll sentiment, and some of these projects are on hold.

E-ZPass

E-ZPass started on the Parkway (Hillsdale Plaza) Dec 1, 1999 before which time tokens thrown in coin machines were about 45% of toll transactions, coins thrown in coin machines were about 35% and cash handed to toll collectors was 20%. E-ZPass was deployed toll plaza by toll plaza from Nov 99 and by Sept 2000 all toll plazas were wired with 151 toll lanes. By April 2001 163 toll lanes were wired. Another 180 toll lanes are due to be wired by Nov 2001 for mixed mode operation, and to give the tollster the flexibility to add ET-only lanes whenever they are needed. By July 2000, eight months after E-ZPass was introduced it became the largest payment mode on the Parkway, displacing tokens. By now E-ZPass transactions represent about half the total transactions with tokens reduced to 25%, coins thrown in coin machines 14%, and cash paid to collectors 12%. Collector staff are being reduced by attrition.

The E-ZPass transition has not been easy. As part of the E-ZPass IAG with full interoperability from opening day, the Parkway had motorists with transponders from the Port Authority of New York/NJ , New York City’s MTA B&T and state Thruway tags, and the Delaware River Port Authority bridges, as well as those issued by the NJ/DE Regional Consortium of which it and its sister NJ tollroads, the NJ Turnpike and Atlantic City Exwy are partners. Close to a third of its patrons had transponders on their windshields by the time the Parkway was ready to switch on. There was a lot of confusion at many of the mainline plazas. Several have curving approaches (Raritan, Essex, Union) and it is very difficult for motorists looking ahead at the canopy-mounted signage from a distance to judge the correct lane. Many kept finding themselves in the wrong lane, then had trouble getting in to the right one. Others got angry at the lane-changers.

NJHA also had different bunchings of payment modes at different plazas. It customized the configuration of collector, coin and E-ZPass lanes differently according to a traffic operations analysis. If there was a exit just downstream of the plaza, they put single ET and automatic coin lanes over on the right too. Motorists just using one plaza got to learn the arrangements. But it produced a lot of complaints from motorists proceeding through multiple plazas or occasionally using different plazas. As a result there were some places where plaza throughout was reduced in the early months of E-ZPass due to an increase in lane-changes and erratic weaving.

Fixes in train now include (1) a standardized plaza configuration in which coin machine lanes are all bunched together on the left, E-ZPass is in the center and collectors are on the rightside in each direction. (2) stronger lane-markings and pavement signage and coloring to get motorists in their correct lanes on the confusing curved-approach plazas. But the big question is when they’ll do highway speed or electronic toll express (ETX.)

Thurston says they’d love to rebuild all the mainline plazas with E-ZPass express lanes down the middle. And they are under strong pressure to do this. Politicians have introduced bills into the state legislature requiring it and there is a drumbeat of demands from motorist organizations, newspapers, enviro groups and the public. Preliminary layouts have been done and costs estimated for ETX lanes. They vary between $7.5m and $17m per toll plaza for a total of $102m for ETX lanes in all eleven mainline plazas. This would provide 57 ETX lanes, consisting of seven plazas with 2x2 ETX lanes, three plazas with 2x3 lanes and what promises to be the world’s widest ETX array at the giant Raritan plaza – 6 ETX lanes one direction, 5 ETX lanes the other direction. That will take traffic near the new 15 lane Driscoll bridge.

The trick to the conversion will be getting E-ZPass usage up further so that throughput allows the necessary central lanes to be taken out of service during ETX lane construction. Vollmer Assoc did modeling for the Auth to estimate when this will be. E-ZPass mode share needs to be gotten up to 57% at five plazas, 62% to 69% at five others and 80% at the tightest, the Essex plaza, Vollmer reckons.

E-ZPass usage is continuing to grow so the Vollmer thresholds for closing off the central lanes for ETX construction should be reached at some plazas before the end of the year, and at most of the rest during next year. Under the new configurations toll lanes at the mainline plazas would decline from the present 206 to 149 (57 ETX, 92 cash).As in other conversions it will be coin-machine only lanes that will be dispensed with more than manned lanes, though some of those will go too. At some point the Parkway will kill tokens. Tokens are bought by the regular users, the motorists who should get a transponder. Token usage is way down but still just ahead of manual. Coin machines will likely continue but for coins only. The Parkway was a pioneer in that it was the first tollroad to deploy automatic coin machines back in its very early days in 1954. Taller & Cooper and Grant Money Meter machines were put onto the Fairlawn ramp plazas, then Taller & Cooper ‘Tollomatics’ began to be deployed at the mainline plazas, starting from the Bergen and Union plazas.

LAYOUT: The GSP was built as a simple 2x2-lane in the 1950s extending from near Cape May in the far southeast corner of the state on the peninsula that forms Delaware Bay all the way up the Jersey shore of the Atlantic to the Raritan River. Beyond the northern shore of the Raritan is a section with one of the world’s most complex set of interchanges (ICs) in which five motorway or near-motorway highways converge and cross one another within a distance of about 2mi: US-9, GSP, I-287/NJ-440, NJ Turnpike and US-1 US-with the NJ Turnpike. It widens progressively from 4 lanes to 12 travel lanes in this 210km (127mi) segment along the Jersey shore. This southern two-thirds is a classic parkway with gently curving roadways set in a generously wide and nicely landscaped right of way. When the parkway was built this southern section along the Jersey shore – actually a few miles inland from the shore – served mainly vacationers and other recreational travelers travelling from the heavily populated areas of northern New Jersey and New York City. Weekends and holidays were the peak periods. But in the last two decades there has been major residential and later, commercial development, in Monmouth and Ocean counties. This is the area south of the jutting ‘chin’ formed by the southern shore at the mouth of the Raritan River across from the south shore of Staten Is. What were previously small isolated coastal settlements have in-filled and urbanized and become a part of the greater New York/northern NJ metropolis. They have spawned major commuter and general business traffic. From IC-105 at NJ-18 northward 109km (68mi) trucks are barred from the parkway, which ends at the New York State line and has a small spur connecting it to the New York State Thruway nearby at Spring Valley. North of the Raritan River the Parkway was built through already developed areas and is more tightly constrained and looks more like any other urban motorway and goes from 2x5-lanes progressively down to 2x2-lanes at the state line. It is mostly at grade with cross streets over it. A 20km (13mi) section US-9 (MP-127) to US-22 (MP-140) now 10 lanes, was constructed with NJDOT tax monies and, although maintained by NJHA toll revenues, it remains untolled. There are two other shorter untolled sections 5km (3mi) (MP-80 to MP-83) in Ocean County and 7km (4mi) (MP-6 to MP-10) in Cape May Co, also untolled because they were built with taxes. With an average travel lane width of 6.2 lanes (1066 lane-mi/173-mi) it is one of the widest tollroads in America. It has 10mi of 12-lanes, 28mi of 10-lane, 16mi of 8-lane, 33mi of 6-lane and 85mi of 4-lane.

The parkway has eight service plazas and also owns a concert hall, which enables its annual report to feature a page of beautiful young performers.

The NJHA has a board appointed by the state governor with state senate consent for five year terms which suggests a degree of independence of political direction. Except that the governor controls who is chairman and vice-chair and has power of veto over any board decision. Moreover toll rate changes must have the prior approval of the governor and of the state treasurer. The authority is virtually an executive department of the state. Its debt however is not a debt or liability of the state and its bonds are usually revenue bonds, secured only by toll revenues.

The NJHA was established by the state in 1952. It was envisaged by the legislators as a permanent tollroad with revenues servicing debt, financing improvements and maintenance and operations. The first toll was collected in 1954. The original financing of the parkway was by $285m of bonds which built a simple 2x2-lane roadway the length of the state with 692 lane-mi, which has been progressively expanded to the present 1,066 lane-mi including 40km (25mi) of dual-dual 10 and 12 lane roadway.The tolled sections of the parkway have never received state tax monies but in 1999 $23m of federal highway trust money was appropriated for I-78 IC improvements and $5m for eliminating the last at-grade intersections at the remote southern end of the parkway.

The parkway has always been a relatively safe road measured by fatalities relative to traffic volume – under 6 deaths per billion miles traveled.

Present toll rates were established in 1989 and tolls are among the lowest per-mile in the country: 1.4c/km (2.2c/mi). The real value of the toll revenues has declined, putting a squeeze on operating costs that was probably healthy in the beginning. But by now however tolls don’t provide any significant surplus to support modest capital improvements, let alone bigger schemes. At present tolls the Authority cannot fund the Driscoll bridge widening, third-laning, or ETX lanes at the mainline plazas. That will have to be addressed after the Nov governor elections. Logically the cash toll must go from 35c to 50c if only because of the need to minimize handling of nickels and dimes. Another source of new revenue and service to the state economy would be for the Parkway to cater to trucks in its present no-trucks segment north of MP-105 – perhaps by special truck lanes segregated from light vehicles. But this would be a radical change and there is no planning for it. Trucking is so central to the future of New Jersey it seems

anomalous that one of its major highways excludes trucks.