Post-Tribune staff report
Northwest Indiana residents had reason to be excited when the Indiana Toll Road opened nearly 50 years ago.
The region’s first superhighway, it provided for the first time an open road across Indiana, a drive uninterrupted except for toll payments, bathroom breaks or stops for food and gas.
“On the toll road you won’t encounter a single stoplight, sharp curve, steep hill, railway crossing or highway intersection at grade level,” an ecstatic Post-Tribune reporter wrote in September 1956, when the toll road’s stretch from Gary to Ohio opened. (The road’s western end, to the Illinois border, opened that November.)
Now the Toll Road faces another historic milestone as the state prepares to receive bids from companies seeking a long-term lease for the road.
When the Indiana Toll Road was built, enthusiasm was high for pay-to-ride highways. In August 1956, the governor of Indiana said only a “bad bond market” would keep the state from starting to finance a north-south toll road through Indiana, starting in Northwest Indiana. That road never was built.
As it turned out, the Indiana Toll Road was built just as the age of freeways began.
The same year it opened, President Eisenhower signed a law creating the system of interstate highways.
Now highway financing may be entering another cycle.
Gov. Mitch Daniels’ proposal to turn the Toll Road’s operations — and revenue — over to a private venture comes just after Chicago did the same with the Chicago Skyway in exchange for $90 million.
And Daniels wants to build an Interstate 69 extension through southern Indiana as a toll road, as highway officials in several other states have done recently.
People who drive cars and trucks pay for building and maintaining the interstates and other highways every time they buy fuel. Toll roads are built and maintained by the fees motorists pay when they drive on them.
Gasoline-tax revenues have not kept up with the need to build new roads and maintain existing ones, state transportation officials have said.
But while it’s difficult for legislators to consider raising gas taxes that every driver pays, it can be politically easier to raise tolls for the people who use a toll road.
A November 2000 paper for the Reason Foundation, a California-based conservative think tank, argued that toll roads — particularly with automated toll payments to eliminate lengthy waits at toll booths — should be the preferred system for paying for highways now because only their users pay for them
A toll road’s bond issue can build a highway more quickly, the paper argues, and the need to justify a project to the bond market keeps out projects justified only by pork-barrel politics.
The paper also notes that some federal highway officials said in the 1950s — the previous high point for toll road construction in the Midwest — that tolls could be removed when the initial bonds were paid off.
Was that commitment made when the Indiana Toll Road was built?
Gary Abell, an Indiana Department of Transportation spokesman, said he could not find anyone, or anything, to verify that the state had promised the Indiana road would become a freeway at some point.
Toll Road history
1951: Indiana Toll Road Commission created by legislation.
1954: Commission issues $280 million in bonds to build the road.
1956: Indiana Toll Road from Gary to Ohio opens to traffic in September. The formal dedication is Sept. 12 in South Bend. The final leg, from Gary to Illinois, opens in November without fanfare.
1980: Toll Road commission issues $259.9 million in bonds to improve the road. Bonds are refinanced in 1985, 1993 and 1996.
1985: The fourth toll increase since the road’s opening goes into effect Oct. 1. (Previous increases were in 1972, 1974 and 1980.) It is the last one until the current proposal.
1985-6: New interchanges open at Cline Avenue, Broadway and Willowcreek Road in Gary and Portage.
2005: One additional travel lane opens in each direction between mileposts 15 and 19 in Gary, the first roadway expansion since the Toll Road opened.