report

Consultants McCormick Taylor and Wilbur Smith Associates (McCT&WSA) say in an interim report that all scenarios they model for the Pennsylvania Turnpike produce net revenue gains from a conversion to all-electronic tolling (AET). In addition AET would improve travel times and safety, reduce emissions, and provide management with more flexibility.

AASHTO, the state DOTs lobby in Washington DC has a report from the Academies of Sciences' Transportation Research Board (TRB) that determinedly avoids toll technologies and expertise in the search for a quick fix to declining gas tax revenues. Written by a RAND Corp led team the report lists three options for estimating vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) charges:

Talk about trying to order back the tide!

Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun is fighting in the courts to try suppress a safety inspection report on his toll bridge. His lawyers cite national security and various confidentiality agreements.

Piffle. 100% piffle.

No report on the safety condition of a publicly used bridge can possibly be justified as "secret."

The FHWA's "Current Toll Road Activity in the US" report we previously wrote on concedes that errors and omissions are possible. see http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/3950 This critique is devoted to a few we found. The most serious omission in our view is lack of discussion or listing of detollings - removals of tolls.

Federal Highway Administration has released a set of twenty analyses of toll road activity in the US, the most comprehensive effort of documentation of tolling in the US to date. It includes a 'white paper', four databases, three summaries, and a bunch of sorts of the data by different classification criteria, and some miscellaneous tables.