RALEIGH — A recent column of mine endorsing the concept — though not the particulars — of using tolls to help finance additional highway capacity in the I-95 corridor of Eastern North Carolina generated more than the usual response from irate readers. Some thought I was kidding. Some thought I was nuts. Some of my own staff members and ideological soulmates objected, as did other columnists and commentators.
I’m not going to restate my argument here. If I were, I’d note that charging highway users according to how much they drive has always been the goal of state transportation policy, only in the past North Carolina has relied entirely on the indirect, rough approximation of motor-fuels taxes rather than direct charges. That meant that the use of particular roadways bore no relationship to the upkeep and expansion of those roadways. That meant that as the fuel efficiency of automobiles increased, the amount of revenue generated per mile traveled went down, despite occasional increases in the tax rate per gallon.
And if I were to continue to restate my argument, I’d note that I wasn’t saying North Carolina shouldn’t get more value for the dollars already taken from drivers in gas and auto taxes. Two of my Locke Foundation colleages wrote a paper some years ago outlining how to address the approximately $400 million annual shortfall between what the state was spending on high-priority projects and what it needed to be spending to keep up with the needs of motorists and the economy. They made a lot of important recommendations for ending wasteful spending, diversion of highway funds, and improving efficiency. But they still concluded that more revenues, in the form of tolls collected from drivers on particular roads, would be needed. The plan was elaborated on by another Locke Foundation analyst and then updated for our 2002 briefing book for candidates. In other words, nothing new here.
And, if I were so inclined, I might add that those who equate taxes and tolls are ignoring basic principles of public finance. Tolls are user fees. They are charged to those who are receiving a proportional service in return, much like households paying water and sewer charges or other utility bills. Taxes are not fees for service. They are compulsory whether you benefit from the service they finance or not. Taxes, then, are appropriate financing vehicles for government services to which citizens are entitled — that is, to which citizens have a right (such as police protection). Fees and charges are appropriate vehicles for financing what amounts to businesses operated by the government essentially for private benefit. (Whether these are legitimate government functions is a separate question; in the case of highways, there has historically been a pricing and enforcement problem given the multitude of ways for users to enter and exit roadways).
But, again, I’m not going to restate my thesis here.
What I thought might be useful instead is to provide some additional online resources that those interested in the debate about tollways, whether they start out pro or con, might want to check out. As an Associated Press article Thursday demonstrated, the issue isn’t going away. Transportation Sec. Lindo Tippett is still strongly in favor and attempting to sell the idea to legislators. Apparently his boss, Gov. Mike Easley, believes the subject to be at least worthy of exploration and not the politically radioactive no-no that some of my email correspondents believe it to be. I guess we’ll see.
Anyway, here are the resources. Read this piece by my old friend Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation on the international trend towards private, investor-owned tollway utilities. Read this piece on the history of toll roads and then this one on how modern tollways actually work (hint: rolls of quarters aren’t required).
If all this looks like too much reading, just be thankful that I didn’t choose to restate my thesis in this column.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.