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Commentator Russell Sadler has written a winner with his newest Op-Ed titled: "Can we stop the toll roads?" (see appended)
Toll Roads are not the issue any more than recreation user fees are the issue. Both are manifestations of the all encompassing effort now underway to commercialize, privatize, commodify, price and sell absolutely everything. Both are peas in the same pod. Yet what is rarely appreciated, is how many peas are in this one pod.
You've heard me speak of the Corporate Takeover of Nature and in that expression, nature refers to one of the peas. The pod contains a full universe and the threat is nothing less than the Corporate Takeover of Everything.
Sadler's Op-Ed is brilliant.
Scott
--begin quoted--
September 17, 2006
Can we stop the toll roads?
Russell Sadler
The Oregon Department of Transportation continues speeding down the
path toward toll roads, blithely bypassing warning signs of growing
public opposition to the entire notion.
The idea of toll roads has been quietly popular in the
Republican-controlled Legislature for nearly a decade as a way to
bypass tax increases needed to build new highways and maintain existing
ones.
During the 1990s, the Legislature borrowed more than a billion dollars
to repair Oregon’s aging bridges and much of the freeway system built
in the 1960s. Aside from a token increase in vehicle registration fees
and truck taxes, the Legislature promised to repay the bonds from
future gas tax revenues.
Bonds payments and routine maintenance now consume nearly all money
from fuel taxes and fees and there is not enough money to build new
highways like the Newberg-Dundee bypass and the Sunrise Corridor from
I-205 toward Damascus plus add lanes to the southern end of I-205.
The Oregon Department of Transportation has contracted with an
Australian firm, the Macquarie Infrastructure Group, to study ways of
financing those three Portland-area road project using tolls. In a
preliminary report, the Macquarie firm says tolls could pay the
$325-$425 million cost of building and maintaining the Newberg-Dundee
bypass, but only if a toll was also imposed on a parallel stretch of
existing 99W to discourage motorists and truckers from avoiding the
toll on the new bypass.
You will not be surprised to learn the idea of imposing tolls on 99W is
going over like screen doors on a submarine in the communities of
Newberg and Dundee. Signs reading “No Toll Road” are already springing
up in Yamhill County.
State Transportation officials insist legislators have told them that
new highways can no longer be financed by the traditional method of
state gas taxes matched with federal highways funds. State officials
were told to come up with alternatives.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that previous generations of
Oregonians built a highway system the present generation is unwilling
to pay to maintain and enlarge.
It is also difficult to escape the conclusion that toll roads are being
introduced as a means of rationing space on already congested highways.
Rationing highway space is certainly the motive behind the silly plan
to tax Oregon motorists by the miles they have driven every time they
fill up at a gas pump.
Rationing is also the motive behind the so-called “Lexus lanes” planned
for the Washington, D.C. area and elsewhere around the country. These
“congestion free” lanes may have no toll or a token toll of perhaps $2.
But anytime the lane gets congested a computer changes the sign where
motorists enter the lane, raising the toll to perhaps $5.
If congestion continues to increase, the computer raises the toll to
perhaps $10-$15 -- high enough to discourage all but the well-heeled
from using the lane, thereby “reducing congestion.” This quaint
economic theory gives a whole new meaning to the phrase about “charging
what the traffic will bear.” This is not merely raising revenue. It is
a form of social control.
Libertarian economists will surely argue this is a just system --
motorists pay for the highways they use based on how much they use
them. It’s the kind of argument that could only fool an economist. It
might make sense if motorists could really choose when and where they
drive. But they cannot. Commuting causes the most congestion. Most
motorists have little to say about the time their employers want them
at work. Tolling to control congestion just punishes the poor and
rewards the wealthy. That is why elected officials eliminated toll
roads and created freeways. They are not free, of course, but they are
paid for by all of us and available to all of us on a first come, first
served basis.
And that is what galls the libertarian economist. The return of toll
roads is an deliberate attack on the egalitarianism that every American
learns in kindergarten. If you try to go to the head of the line, you
are told “no cuts” by your classmates. If you try to push ahead in the
cafeteria line, you are told “first come, first served.” If you are
caught in a traffic jam, you are told “we are all in this together.
Relax, your turn will come.”
Libertarian economists truly believe people willing to pay more should
go to the head of the line. Most Americans, however, are egalitarian.
They do not believe in an aristocracy of wealth. That is why we prefer
freeways over toll roads. And that is why the stealthy effort to return
to road tolls will be met with angry opposition when people figure it
out is simply a scheme to ration space on the highway for the
well-to-do.
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