Will ICC give tolls a bad name?
Cavan Wilks has written a perceptive piece for the Greater Greatter Washington blog about the high tolls motorists can look forward to when the Intercounty Connector opens.
Essentially, Wilks delivers the message that the announced ICC tolls are expensive because the road itself has been expensive to build. He theorizes -- and I suspect he's correct -- that the ICC experience will sour the public on the cost of new highways.
Tolls were accepted by the public in the pre-interstate era because people really wanted roads to match the explosive growth in the availability of cars. But once the interstate system was born in 1956 and the concept of the freeway caught on, tolled highways seemed anachronistic. Before the ICC, no tollroads have been built in Maryland since the Kennedy Highway in the early 1960s.
In Maryland, all of our current tollls are on old infrastructure -- built at a time when construction costs were much less. No new toll facilities have come on line since the Fort McHenry Tunnel in 1985. Generally, Maryland's existing tolls aren't that onerous. Sure, you'll pay $5 to go north on the Kennedy Highway, but it's free coming back. The Bay Bridge toll of $2.50, collected from eastbound drivers only, is still the best bargain in Maryland.
With the prevailing perception that taxes are too high and tolls aren't so bad, there wasn't much resistance to the decision to make the ICC a tollroad.
But with the state's plan callling for peak drive time tolls of as much as $6 -- each way -- to drive from Interstate 95 to Interstate 270 , the perception of tolling in Maryland could change, Wilks believes. Resistance to projects such as the proposed $4.6 billion widening of Interstate 270 from Shady Grove to Frederick could change.
What should be a concern for Baltimore is any effort by Montgomery County politicians to lower ICC tolls. That's because there is no free lunch here. To lower tolls on the ICC, money would have to be taken from somewhere else in the form of deferred transportation projects, higher taxes or higher tolls on non-ICC facilities -- all of which are located to the east of Montgomery County. As it is, toll-backed bonds account for only half of the cost of building the $2.6 billion ICC. It is difficult to envision any scenario under which Baltimore would not be stuck with a disproportionate share of the bill for easing ICC toll payers' pain.
