The Commonwealth imposes a special levy on wholesale gasoline—which gets passed to consumers at the pump—to provide funds for building Turnpike Projects.
The Commonwealth forces the Turnpike Commission to provide $450 million dollars to the Department of Transportation to heavily subsidize mass transit necessitating heavy annual borrowing that leads to higher tolls to cover the borrowing.
Each of these plans boosts the cost of driving in the state: higher gasoline pump prices and steadily increasing Turnpike tolls.
Thus, gasoline taxes are being used to fund toll roads where tolls being are pushed higher by need to subsidize mass transit, which in turn, make the Turnpike roads less attractive. Cross purposes anyone?
One would have thought that toll roads should be self- funded. Indeed, why should drivers on regular roads pay taxes to maintain those roads as well as pay for roads that will require a toll?
As was pointed out in a recent Policy Brief, the non-mainline toll roads in western PA are not generating traffic or revenue adequate to justify their building costs and there is no reputable or persuasive study to show that the economic effects justify their cost.
This is especially true in light of the diversion of large amounts of toll revenue to pay for bonds that are being issued to provide money for mass transit.
Clearly, since mass transit is a public service provided by government for the general public, its costs should not be borne primarily by motorists and commercial vehicles that are paying taxes to maintain the roads used by mass transit buses that do not pay fuel taxes. Other more broadly based revenue is more appropriate.
One also needs to consider the extraordinary costs of transportation infrastructure and services in PA.
For instance, the Turnpike Commission spends $50,000 on benefits per active employee. That clearly has an impact on the tolls being charged. Prevailing wage laws drive road and bridge construction and maintenance costs up by as much 30 percent above what they could otherwise be. The Port Authority in Pittsburgh has some of the highest operating costs in the country–and the workers have the right to strike, guaranteeing the Port Authority will never be able to rein in costs as much as they should be able to do.
Little wonder PA has gasoline prices about 30 cents per gallon higher than the national average and neighboring Ohio.
Sadly, high transportation costs across the board fueled by the inability to deal with the high costs resulting from labor favoring legislation are hampering the state’s economy, and that produces slow growth in the revenue and perpetual budget crises.
In Pittsburgh, the North Shore Connector used over a half billion transportation dollars that should have been directed at fixing the traffic bottlenecks around the City and upgrading existing infrastructure. All done apparently, so people can ride free between downtown and the North Shore creating even more unnecessary subsidies.
The Commonwealth has a lot of room for improvement in the transportation sector.
