Transportation experts say new toll lanes are needed to relieve traffic congestion around major cities. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
Transportation experts say new toll lanes are needed to relieve traffic congestion around
major cities. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham:
The experts say it would be a market-based solution. If you want to avoid heavy traffic,
you can pull your car into a voluntary toll lane and pay for the privilege of going faster.
Rob Atkinson is with Progressive Policy Institute, and is one of the experts who testified
before a congressional committee about the idea.
“You would expand those highways and add a couple lanes in each direction, but those
lanes would be tolled. So if you don’t want to pay the toll, you can just stay in the regular
lanes and actually you’d be a lot better off because there’d be people who would move from
those lanes – the free lanes – over to the tolled lanes. So it’s sort of one of those win-win
situations.”
Atkinson says gasoline taxes and other fees don’t pay the full cost of roads, so an alternative
such as voluntary toll lanes would help get closer to paying the actual cost of commuting.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.