Highway Tolling Has Entered the Mainstream

Both the public and private sector are expressing increasing interest in the concept of highway tolling. This paper suggests several factors that have helped push highway tolling into the mainstream. First, growing transportation budget shortfalls have been keeping the tolling option front and center before governors, state legislatures, and state transportation officials, with encouragement from the U.S. Department of Transportation. In addition, private capital markets have discovered transportation infrastructure such as toll roads to be an attractive investment opportunity. Private toll concessionaires also are increasingly willing to accept availability payments and toll revenue sharing as financial compensation. As far back as 2003, the author suggested that tolls may assume a dominant role in the funding of new highway capacity in the near future, perhaps as early as the next decade. Five years later, he still believes that this prediction is accurate and that tolls and private capital are the best ways to finance future highway capacity without raising taxes.

Language

  • English

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Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01100282
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS
  • Created Date: Jun 3 2008 7:22AM