Tolling Urban Freeways

[Silophant]

Depends. Are the tolls high enough that tolls + gas tax is more than is needed for road maintenance? If so, then yes. If not, which is much more likely, then no, no cuts to the gas tax. The idea here is to fund the highway department, not underfund it in a different way. If my personal opinion was that no one should drive, letting the FHA run out of money and letting the freeway system decay into gravel would seem to be a good way of doing that.

[min-chi-cbus]

Urban freeways resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of housing units in the core cities and the loss of nearly two hundred thousand residents.

Correlation does not imply causation. We've been over this before, but the vast vast vast percentage of Minneapolis's population drop is related to a decrease in household size, which has very little to do with freeways.

I would make an argument that freeways DID cause household sizes to shrink......indirectly.

[go4guy]

Depends. Are the tolls high enough that tolls + gas tax is more than is needed for road maintenance? If so, then yes. If not, which is much more likely, then no, no cuts to the gas tax. The idea here is to fund the highway department, not underfund it in a different way. If my personal opinion was that no one should drive, letting the FHA run out of money and letting the freeway system decay into gravel would seem to be a good way of doing that.

I'm not sure if you are joking, as this is the same rediculous argument anti-transit people make about light rail that we all laugh at. To say that highways should not be subsidized is the same as saying transit should not be. Might as well start charging full cost to ride every form of mass transit.

[mattaudio]

Right now transit has to be subsidized because we subsidize urban freeways and we social engineer a low-value land use. If people were charged the full cost of their mobility decisions, excellent transit (charging market rates) would become much more viable.

In Minnesota, less than 42% of road costs (not streets, just roads up to and including freeways) are paid by the sum of all gas taxes, tolls, and user fees. That means the state gas tax would need to go up 250% before we should even be talking about expansion of our road network, which adds further liabilities on our public books.

[RailBaronYarr]

The argument that an urban freeway toll would hurt lower-income people is borderline absurd. Yes, it would cost more per vehicle to travel (at a higher speed than our current system, mind you, since "free" roads congest up very heavily), but there are multiple paths of mitigation:

- Since we have so many lanes in each direction on urban freeways, charge different price points per lane, resulting in variable speeds giving people options
- Instead of allowing carpoolers to ride for free in lanes, just let the price encourage it by splitting costs among multiple riders. Many people use kids/babies in the car on the way to daycare as "Carpooling = HOV," clogging up the HO/T lanes while not taking any vehicles off the road.
- Invest toll money back into the corridor. Not extra lanes (necessarily, but perhaps eventually), but use surplus funds (above and beyond corridor maintenance/construction) to build bus lines/stations/feeder lines. Buses use fastest toll lane available. Are we struggling to fund the 35W Access project and Lake St aBRT in the next 2 years (or why it wasn't there over the past 40)? Toll money for these projects!!
- If tolling reduces driving (number of trips or length of trips) in the short-term, we need to acknowledge the long-term benefits that brings in terms of climate change (which will undoubtedly affect lower income people vastly more than upper income) and public health (urban freeways disproportionally send pollutants directly into lower income residents lungs as a result of 1) original freeway routing and 2) continued concentration of low property values and therefore poverty near freeways themselves). That's a progressive, positive outcome (and keep in mind, it's not like we're even talking about a direct carbon tax here - the money generated from tolls would probably not even make up the shortfall in our road funding gap).

Yes, any plan we would implement would probably come with some short-to-medium term pain (not just on lower income people, but middle as well). We need to be aware that 60 years ago we inflicted a LOT of short and long-term pain on people by building these freeways in the first place. Those are sunk costs and we shouldn't be willing to do anything and everything to reshape our landscape in a matter of 10 years (like 50s/60s-era planners were given the right to do), but slow changes that can start reverting 50 years of decisions can help. Are Germany (which has extremely high gas taxes and car-owning fees in lieu of congestion charges - which doesn't directly speed up traffic at rush hours but increases the price of driving) or Singapore (which has had electronic road pricing since the 70s) are more or less harmful on lower-income residents than our current system.

Urban freeways resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of housing units in the core cities and the loss of nearly two hundred thousand residents.

Correlation does not imply causation. We've been over this before, but the vast vast vast percentage of Minneapolis's population drop is related to a decrease in household size, which has very little to do with freeways.

Household sizes have dropped nationwide since the 50s. So the population loss in core cities as a result of household size drop beyond the nation-wide trend could be attributed to freeways into core cities allowing families to live further out than they otherwise would have chosen to. If you don't think that 2.3 square miles given over to freeways/highways within Minneapolis' borders (4.2% of all land, 7% of taxable land beyond parks/streets), plus the widening of certain streets and mass clearing of structures for parking/etc, didn't have an effect on the drop in Minneapolis' population since 1950... I don't know.

[Tom H.]

Right now transit has to be subsidized because we subsidize urban freeways and we social engineer a low-value land use. If people were charged the full cost of their mobility decisions, excellent transit (charging market rates) would become much more viable.

Great comment. Many great transit systems, including the NYC subway and the Twin City Rapid Transity company, arose as private ventures. Same with passenger intercity railroad service - these things thrived, even when charging market rates.

What changed is that a hugely-subsidized, effectively free competitor (the highway system) was introduced into the market. No private enterprise can compete against that.

[mattaudio]

And we have this illusion that private mobility options such as streetcars (TCRT) and rail (passenger service to small towns across the state) somehow died a natural death. No, we killed them. We subsidized their competition, and we engaged in shady regulation/etc that opened the wounds up more and more. If anyone is curious, read about changing railroad regulation in the 50s and 60s sometime... fascinating!

[RailBaronYarr]

I came across this nugget in a paper I was reading recently looking for some freeway facts:

"The need for an expressway between the central business districts of St. Paul and Minneapolis became clear immediately upon the growth of popularity and affordability of the automobile. Previously, there had been a connection between the two downtowns via the Milwaukee Road railroad, with a station in Merriam Park, a fashionable St. Paul suburb in the late 1880s, which provided a 12-minute trip to each downtown."

http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/20 ... eeways.pdf page 22 of the pdf document.

So, rail travel well over a hundred years ago provided faster travel to downtown than rail/bus today, and faster than most car trips even today, and done at a profit.

[froggie]

In Minnesota, less than 42% of road costs (not streets, just roads up to and including freeways) are paid by the sum of all gas taxes, tolls, and user fees. That means the state gas tax would need to go up 250% before we should even be talking about expansion of our road network, which adds further liabilities on our public books.

What was your source for this? The numbers I've seen in the past for roads-other-than-streets are a noticeably higher number.

[RailBaronYarr]

I'll self-source mine to contradict Matt's numbers: https://streets.mn/2014/01/03/road-infra ... -who-pays/

Using all highway, road, and street costs and all user fees (including parking) across MN, the number is 46.5%. If you take the portion of federal gas tax and MN MVST devoted to transit and put that "back in" to funding roads, the number bumps up to 51.1%.

Side note, I am well aware than many streets across the state include provisions for walking (sidewalks) or biking (mostly paint since outside core cities cycling infra is usually part of parks depts). Additionally, many people leisurely walk or start a bicycle commute on streets with no sidewalks in suburbs due to low traffic counts, making them "multi-modal". However, I have no way of knowing what % of streets have sidewalks and what % they consume of the budget, and having grown up in a typical MSP suburb I'd say the vast majority of costs and users are drivers (and people parking).

I am also curious where the 42% number comes from.

[David Greene]

So if we start tolling all the roads, then do they cut the gas tax? It has to even out some how. You dont just toll roads because your personal opinion doesn't want people driving.

No, this would be additional revenue and would ideally go to roads AND transit (unlike the gas tax). The gas tax isn't covering our costs as it is. We need more revenue.

[mattaudio]

http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoli ... d-spending

[grant1simons2]

You don't have to pay any tolls if you don't drive

Yeah let me just take the non-exsistent transit/unreliable bus or train out of state. OR I could just bike on the back roads and take about 8 hours to get Stillwater or such. You sometimes need to drive and right now, although there is still traffic, I think the systems we have right now are fine.

[RailBaronYarr]

You don't have to pay any tolls if you don't drive

Yeah let me just take the non-exsistent transit/unreliable bus or train out of state. OR I could just bike on the back roads and take about 8 hours to get Stillwater or such. You sometimes need to drive and right now, although there is still traffic, I think the systems we have right now are fine.

? Complaining about non-existent or unreliable transit service in areas inherently designed to be bad for transit use seems odd. No one is saying you shouldn't drive, just that if you do (and want it to be a quick drive), then be prepared to pay a toll to do so when everyone else has the exact same idea. This is in contrast to just pressuring DOTs to build more capacity to alleviate congestion when the funding isn't even covering the costs of what we have.

I'd also say that things aren't fine right now. I'm only 3 days away from never commuting to Chanhassen again, but it says a LOT that in my years of doing so, taking side roads and neighborhood streets was almost always faster than staying on 62 (coming back in to Mpls) or 494 (when I lived in Lakeville). 62 can take 35 to 45 minutes to get from the 169 interchange to the merge with 35W on bad days. I know other stretches of many freeways are no better. This doesn't work, and years of just building more lanes/better interchanges hasn't really solved the problem.

[the other scott]

Many great transit systems, including the NYC subway and the Twin City Rapid Transity company, arose as private ventures. Same with passenger intercity railroad service - these things thrived, even when charging market rates.

Not entirely true. While TCRT was a privately held company, they were also regulated as a utility and could not raise fares at will, or as the market demanded. Even if they could have raised fares to cover their costs, they still would not have survived against the onslaught of subsidized road building and the auto industry.

[IllogicalJake]

This topic intrigues me...

Honest question, (if this hasn't been answered already,) would any percentage of my taxes be going to these roadways if I have to pay to use them? How is that handled in cities that have urban toll highways implemented? It seems like many would feel that paying taxes is already paying to use the infrastructure...

[go4guy]

I believe the highways within the loop and including the loop should be built to meet capacity needs. It is not out of the question to think that people should be able to live within that area and move around efficiently. But I think it should stop there. Roads and bridges to nowhere (St Croix Bridge) are not a good thing to spend money on, and would be a great idea for a toll bridge. Same with 610, 212.... I dont think that roads inside the loop should be tolled. The vast population already uses those roads and have property with those roads in mind. To all of a sudden toll their drive would not be fair. I also think that LRT should be expanded to also cover those areas within the loop, but not go beyond it.

[mister.shoes]

So the densest areas of the metro should always have enough "free" highway capacity to meet the needs of the residents?

[mattaudio]

It is true that new freeways outside the beltway are especially egregious. They induce traffic inside the beltway, disproportionately affecting the freeway commutes of people who don't use the new freeways. It's a case where new freeways can instantly make users of existing freeways worse off.

Inside the beltway is exactly where tolling can be useful, by ensuring adequate level of service on our existing infrastructure. We can't build to meet capacity needs - the costs are just too high. And even if we could afford it, should we? At price = $0? If a restaurant gave away free food every day, I'd probably eat their food all the time. Their demand would be nearly infinite, since the only thing constraining that demand would be the limits of one's own gluttony. Demand for freeway capacity is the same way - we need a constraint that is market-based that allows for people to make rational choices based on the costs of their mobility decisions.

[go4guy]

True, but I would argue that we shouldnt toll those roads until we have adequate infrastructure in place. Otherwise, you are still only giving people the same option, but now paying more for it. It currently takes me less than 15 minutes to get to work using the freeways and city streets. That same trip takes over an hour using metro transit. That is not an adequate alternative to driving. A better system needs to be in place.