by James A. Bacon
Hampton Roads transportation planning officials are giving serious thought to putting tolls on the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel and the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge Tunnel as a tool to reduce congestion during periods of peak demand.
Under the conceptual plan presented Wednesday to the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB), the toll would be set at whatever rate it took to create free-flowing traffic conditions at the two crossings, which are frequently subject to backups many miles long.
The purpose of the tolls would not be to pay for new construction nor to raise money for other purposes, Dwight L. Farmer, executive director of the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization (HRTPO), told the CTB. “The concept is simply to change behavior.”
Farmer suggested that modest tolls from $.50 to $1.50 per trip would be sufficient to induce travelers to shift their trips to less-congested times of day, although the tolls could run higher if that’s what it took to ameliorate congestion. “The idea is to utilize the capacity more effectively.”
Farmer and Molly Ward, chairman of the HRTPO and mayor of the city of Hampton, brought up the idea as part of a broader presentation about the region’s top transportation priorities. The region is expected to generate roughly $200 million a year in new revenue under new transportation-funding legislation. That revenue over the next 50 years can be converted into roughly $3 billion in bonding capacity.
That may sound like a lot but it is not nearly sufficient to cover the region’s top transportation priorities, which include widening Interstate 64 on the Peninsula, expanding capacity of the two bridge-tunnels, widening I-64 south of the James River and improving the I-64/I-264 interchange, not to mention implementing high-speed, intercity passenger rail. The mega-projects are so expensive that a single one of them could gobble up the entire $3 billion.
Moreover, it could take 10 to 12 years of deliberations, studies, approvals and construction before any of those projects could be built. The beauty of the congestion toll, says Ward, is that it would require no longer than a year to get the regulatory green light and a year to install the tolling system. Thus, tolls could be a fast fix for congestion at two of the region’s worst bottlenecks.
The HRTPO has entertained the idea of congestion tolls since 2005, says Farmer, but Ward is the first political leader willing to take the flack for going public with it.
The toll could virtually eliminate congestion by changing the behavior of just 10% of drivers, Farmer says. He gave the example of a retired U.S. Navy officer who books a medical appointment at 8:00 a.m. when he could easily wait until later in the morning. There probably wouldn’t be a toll for 18 hours out of the day, and many days out of the year probably would be toll-free, he says.
Another advantage of the tolls, says Ward, is that they would collect real-world data on how price-sensitive traffic is in the region. Before dropping a couple billion dollars building a new tunnel, which would be financed through tolls, a congestion-tolling experiment would gather hard data on whether the market would support tolls needed to build a mega-project like a new tunnel. It is not unheard-of for toll revenues to fall short of projections, as investors in the Dulles Greenway and the Pocahontas Parkway discovered to their misfortune.
“You’re talking about spending an enormous amount of money,” says Ward. “Let’s generate some data and let that guide our decision.”
If this idea gets implemented, says Farmer, Virginia would be the first state outside of California to institute pure congestion tolls. The congestion tolls in Northern Virginia are being used to pay for adding lanes to the Capital Beltway and Interstate 95. “If it’s successful,” he adds, “it will change the way we do business.”
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