Morton J. Marcus is an economist formerly with the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. His column appears in Indiana newspapers, and his views can be followed on a podcast: https://mortonjohn.libsyn.com. His column appears in Indiana newspapers.
The State of Indiana has hired a firm to study the potential for tolling selected interstate highways. Both conservative and liberal Hoosiers are rumbling under the surface. A tsunami of protests could result as early as December this year when the first report is due.
Toll roads are considered by many to be un-American. Toll bridges and tunnels are more accepted. They are incontrovertible evidence of human resistance to being told by Mother Nature “You can’t get there from here.” Somehow roads are different.
Of course, Indiana does have a toll road stretching from Ohio to Illinois. It was carefully built in the 1950s to avoid being useful to Hoosiers. Except in Lake County, the toll road avoids cities and there it serves mainly the steel and petroleum industries.
For years the Indiana toll road had single access points in South Bend and Elkhart. It avoided downtown areas that might have benefited from easier access. It hugged the Michigan border. Xenophobic Hoosiers were told, “We’re going to get those foreign trucks off your streets.” Those foreign trucks were from Ohio and Illinois.
The Indiana General Assembly brayed loudly to keep I-69 from being a toll road between Martinsville and Indianapolis. Likewise, without any rationale, I-465 is to be unblemished by tolls. Fortunately, our legislature has experience reversing itself when its manifest poor judgement is revealed.
Tolls make sense. They are a fee for using facilities the public wants, but does not wish to support. The gas tax is a hidden user fee, fast becoming an anachronism as the smog-generating gasoline engine recedes before the electric motor.
Tolls require those who use the roads to pay for them. The interstate highways are premium transportation arteries paralleled by slower conventional roads almost everywhere. If you want to use a premium road, perhaps you should pay a premium for that use.
It’s a simple concept, as the gas tax used to be. Although often woefully low, the gasoline tax served conservative and liberal causes. The more you drove, the more gasoline you used and the more gas tax you paid. The heavier or more powerful your car, the more gasoline you used. That was a nice use tax, seeming to hit the driving elite, and doing some good for the environment.
As America became wealthier, the more we used cars and gasoline, and the more we paid in taxes. Public transit, subsidized inadequately by all levels of government, was relegated to the poor, the infirm, and the quixotic. You won’t find it in the better suburbs.
Tolls may keep poor people from using premium roads, when they need such roads most… as in getting to a hospital or work. But we could solve that problem just as we eliminated hunger with food stamps: electronic highway tokens to offset toll charges. Remember: Tony the Tiger says we’re already Grrreat.