RALEIGH — With North Carolina and many other states facing a serious crisis in highway maintenance, capacity, and congestion, both state and national politicians seem intent on a “solution” that relies heavily on traditional big-spending projects, including the possibility of additional tax increases on gasoline. This reflects a lack of imagination and an unwillingess to try new ideas.
Here’s one worth considering. Transportation guru Robert Poole, tollways expert Peter Samuel, and the thoughtful folks at the Reason Public Policy Institute in California recommend in a new paper that Congress use its upcoming reauthorization of the federal highway bill to introduce pilot programs for truck-only toll lanes along several major highway corridors.
Poole and Samuel observe that trucks carry about 90 percent of the freight traffic in the U.S., most of it crossing state lines along roads that are increasingly congested and often poorly maintained. “From 1980 to 2000, vehicle miles traveled on on the highway system grew by 80 percent, while lane-miles increased by only 4 percent,” they write. “Truck VMT has grown even faster than automobile VMT, and is projected to keep doing so through 2020.”
Some see this trend of escalating demand by trucking companies and inadequate supply of roadway as justifying additional taxpayer financing of rail lines as an alternative way to ship freight. In North Carolina, for example, the state spends tens of millions of dollars a year on its Rail Program, and officials would like to see more tax dollars allocated to improving rail lines and linking up short lines to rail corridors to give freight shippers an option to crowded highways.
I’m not against competition, naturally, but using either highway tax dollars or general tax dollars to subsidize rail is the wrong direction to go. A better idea is, as Poole and Samuel propose, to put more private capital to work expanding the interstate highway system to accommodate more truck freight, particularly in the form of so-called Longer Combination Vehicles, or LCVS, that include double- or triple-trailer rigs and thus can carry more freight per driver and per unit of cost (though for many products rail will continue to be the most economical choice, given the lower staffing levels required to move massive amounts of freight). Yes, some of this additional capacity might still involve the expenditure of public dollars, too, as the authors admit, but even so these dollars are collected from highway users in the form of per-gallon fuel taxes. Users of the highway system as a whole are not subsidized by those using rail and other alternatives. The opposite is true.
More importantly, of the roadways where Poole and Samuel recommend the federal and state governments begin to implement new truck-only tollways, many of them would likely derive the bulk of their funding from direct charges to lane users rather than indirect charges to all users. They’ve actually gone to the point of soliciting support for the proposed “truck-ways” from the American Trucking Association, representing potential uers, and from the National Safety Council, which often opposes trucking interests that seek to use heavier or longer vehicles to improve their productivity.
After studying the national interstate grid in detail and soliciting ideas from freight haulers, Poole and Samuel have come up with a list of proposed truck-only tollways. Interestingly, North Carolina’s much-traveled interstates are not on the authors’ list of proposed projects, in part because none of the few existing lines that accommodate LCVs come near our state, so new tollways linking them up wouldn’t, either. But North Carolinians would still likely benefit from the endeavor. For example, looking at the RPPI map of projects, one set of new truck-only toll lanes would be added to I-81 stretching from Pennsylvania (linking to an existing LCV system in New York) down through Virginia and into Knoxville, where I-75 would pick up the toll lanes down through Georgia and into Florida (where there is another preexisting LCV road).
Basically, this tollway would run all the way around the western side of North Carolina without coming through. Inevitably, the attractiveness of such a system to freight haulers looking to use double- and triple-trailer rigs, and willing to pay more for the use of the presumably faster truck-only lane, would induce some shippers currently sending trucks through North Carolina to use the alternative. That would divert traffic off some of the country’s most congested interstates, such as I-85 and I-77, reducing wear and tear on our roadways to boot. Highway safety would improve, since trucks are involved in an increasing share of accidents (though in fairness all measures of highway accidents show improvement over time, just less of one with truck-related incidents). And by using user fees, the system would generate more traffic-capacity “bang for the buck” for motorists than traditional road-building would.
Sounds like a win-win proposition, except perhaps for rail advocates seeking more handouts. Someone in Washington will probably have a problem with that, but let’s suspend our pessimism and hope for a rational transportation policy out of Congress. Stranger things have happened — though don’t ask me to generate a lengthy list.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.
