Test Tube for Tolls

If any of the bills now before the California Legislature that would allow Orange County to experiment with toll roads are enacted and signed into law, they will make history. And that sort of history is just what the county needs.

Toll roads would break with the state tradition of financing freeways with gas taxes, even though tolls are another form of user fee and are not entirely new in California. Tolls must be paid to cross 10 bridges around the state. But tolls have not been applied to high-speed roads--hence the name freeway --and that would change for at least one highway in Orange County if the experiment were to go forward. The question to be answered by the experiment is whether toll roads are a solution to growing population and growing traffic congestion in times when there is not enough public money available to build new roads to accommodate the increase in both traffic and population.

Sen. Wadie P. Deddah (D-Chula Vista), chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, noted that neither his committee nor the full Senate is likely to support the widespread use of toll roads. But Deddah said he reluctantly supports experimenting with toll roads in Orange County because he considers the situation “desperate,” and believes that the state must look at “every possibility, every avenue, every innovation.”

Deddah’s experiment should go forward. In the past 10 years, Orange County’s population has grown by about 400,000 residents, but in that time just two miles of freeway have been added to the system. The county can’t afford another decade like that. But residents balk at higher taxes to pay for roads, as demonstrated by one election and in their answers to several opinion polls. And, if that does not change, another decade like the last one is exactly what the county can expect.

That leaves transportation officials with few options, and makes paying for roads with tolls more attractive than it has ever been--particularly in Orange County, where any one of at least three new transportation corridors could be used for a toll-road experiment.

The proposed corridors parallel other highways, which means that motorists could avoid paying tolls by taking alternative routes. There is also other funding available, like federal money already approved to cover 35% of the cost of a toll road as a federal pilot project and local developer fees paid on new housing projects. Those funds would help keep tolls at a reasonable level. Road-construction bonds that would be backed by toll revenues could be paid off in a relatively short time, about 10 years, and tolls could then be suspended.

With the need for highways so great, and the chances of finding money elsewhere so slim, the Legislature should make Orange County its test tube for toll roads.