Pennsylvania shouldn’t turn I-80 into state’s cash cow

Published:Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Pennsylvania shouldn’t turn I-80 into state’s cash cow

The state of Pennsylvania is once again putting together a proposal that it hopes will cause the federal government to give the state an asset that was built as part of the interstate highway system. Oh, and then to allow the state to turn a healthy profit off that asset, which it will be free to divert as it pleases.

The asset we’re talking about, of course, is Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania, which both the administration of Gov. Ed Rendell and the Legislature want dearly to turn into a toll road.

It matters not that communities along the length of the East-West superhighway have protested that turning I-80 into another turnpike will hurt economic development along the road. It matters not that there is no logical reason why the federal government should give Pennsylvania such a potential cash cow. Rendell and the Legislature have been having problems balancing the state’s budget and they’re hoping to ride I-80 all the way to fiscal insolvency. The I-80 toll proposal is also being billed as an alternative to another equally bad idea — leasing the existing Pennsylvania Turnpike to a private company, which would then happily profit for the next 75 or 100 years off the toll-paying users of the turnpike.

Always the same answer

Why is it that government (and this is certainly not a fault exclusive to Pennsylvania state government) only has one answer to balancing a budget — find more ways of reaching into the pockets of the taxpayers?

And make no mistake, turning I-80 into a toll road won’t be the end of it.

Planners are working on various tolling scenarios for I-80 that Project Manager Barry J. Schoch says, “might be a prototype of the way interstates are tolled in the future.” Ah, the future. Pennsylvanians — indeed, Ohioans and residents of most other states — should be aware that pressure is increasing to build new toll roads or to convert free highways into toll roads. The movement’s growing popularity is the beneficiary of an unlikely alliance between marketplace economists who believe that privately run toll roads are better than government-funded roads and big spenders in government who see state-operated toll roads as new revenue producers. Regardless of who is collecting the tolls, the drivers of cars and trucks using the roads will pay.

If Americans make an informed decision to support a shift that will eventually turn many, if not most, of the nation’s major highways into toll roads, then that’s how it should be. But more often than not politics drives such movements and taxpayers are left to wonder afterward what happened.

Crunch the numbers

In the case of Pennsylvania’s I-80 proposal, we hope federal regulators take a very close look at the numbers that have become public so far.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission says it will spend about $250 million a year from I-80 toll collections to repair the highway’s surface, rebuild its bridges and perform other construction, which is about four times what it spends on the 311-mile road now. It notes the obvious need for repaving of much of the surface and for replacing bridges, some of which are structurally deficient.

But if the state hasn’t properly maintained the road, wouldn’t that speak to the state’s failure to live up to its obligations after the federal government built the highway? Should the state be rewarded for such a failure?

But more than that, the state pledges to spend nearly $200 million more on maintenance than it is spending now, But revenue from the road is projected at $1 billion a year for the first 10 years and as much as $2.5 billion a year later.

Where will the rest of the money go? And why should Washington give Harrisburg such a money-making asset? Somehow we don’t think that a toll road producing four to 10 times what is needed to maintain it is what President Eisenhower envisioned when he championed an interstate highway system more than 50 years ago.

We’ve thought converting I-80 to a toll road was a bad idea when we addressed it two years ago, and we still think it’s a bad idea.