Kansas Turnpike CEO Johnston says "No way" to speed related toll

Kansas Turnpike president /CEO Michael L Johnston says "No way" to the proposal for toll rates to be graduated according to speed: "We're in the service business, not in law enforcement. End of story."

Johnston added: "Our aim is to cultivate positive relations with our customers and I don't see this (idea) as engendering warm and fuzzy relations. I don't think it is desirable. I don't think it is workable."

Of course it would be technically workable especially in Kansas which has a ticket or trip toll system where entry and exit times and places are recorded. Distance is used to compute the toll and time to curb ticket swapping swindles or to for customer service to deal with anomalies.

Average speeds could easily be computed by dividing distance by time elapsed between entry and exit. The Haley plan technically would be mostly a matter an IT guy of writing some code.

The question is whether it is workable public policy.

A state senator David Haley (Democrat) who represents the northern suburbs of Kansas City says he will be introducing a bill to provide for higher toll rates for trips made in excess of the 70mph (113km/hr) posted speed limit.

Haley is quoted: "Every time the KTA has categorically raised tolls, I wince. I say there has got to be something that is conduct-based, which is what this legislation would provide... If you pay incrementally more for going over the posted speed limit, maybe people would check their speed more often."

AP says Haley has written a  bill but as of Tuesday afternoon none appears on the Kansas legislature's website, and the senator's office hasn't responded to a request for a copy.

In researching this we googled it and turned up a TOLLROADSnews report we'd totally forgotten from March 2007 and a similar speed-toll bill from Senator Haley, that doesn't appear to have gone very far.

His new bill seems to be a recycling of the 2007 bill.

This was SB205 amending the Turnpike's enabling legislation saying: "the (Turnpike) authority is hereby authorized to develop and implement a system of tolls based on the average speed driven by a person using the turnpike..."

http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/1817

OPINION: We expressed a preference there for an inverted-Haley toll regime, one which penalizes the slow pokes, the frustrating people who block the road.

Surely the anti-slowpokes bill would garner real public support?

Here's an even better idea than our anti-Haley bill of 2007 - rather than charge per-mile traveled they'd charge for the time you spent on the Turnpike.

Instead of 10c/mile the toll would be say 10c/minute.

We guess that has about as much chance of getting enacted as the Haley plan, though it would be fun to see it championed.

TOLLROADSnews 2009-01-06