Our Toll Roads – A Part of NJ’s Problems

In one of my trips out of state, I was chatting with a person who asked me where I was from. When I said, “New Jersey,” he replied, “That is the state with all those tolls.”
Growing up out West, I used to driving for days without ever having to pay a toll, yet here one can hardly move around within the county without having to shell money out of his pocket.
Years back, I was in Central Jersey attending a meeting sponsored by a group of people fighting New Jersey’s toll culture. There I first met Bob Ahlers, who has published a book entitled, “Tolls in New Jersey, An expensive burden on commuters, the trucking industry and the economy.”
As an aside, let me state how much I admire people like Ahlers. Why did Ahlers put himself out to attend meetings over the years and now to research and write this book?
He gains nothing from his work except the satisfaction of trying to make his state a better place. He does what he does because what our state is doing is wrong; it makes no sense on many levels, and Ahlers is not going to just sit there and ignore this blight. It is the spirit of millions of people like Ahlers who created and sustain our wonderful land; I salute Ahlers and people like him.
Ahlers has taken the time to consider the various ways of funding road systems and to compare New Jersey with our tolls to those states which fund their roads without tolls. The fact is, toll roads are inconvenient for the driver, because they have to be designed to insure that tolls are collected instead of providing multiple points of entry and exit. It is vastly more expensive to collect tolls than to just add the cost to the gasoline price.
 Ahlers goes through the numbers showing how much more we spend collecting tolls on the Garden State Parkway, Atlantic City Expressway and New Jersey Turnpike vs. the gasoline-tax method. While we collect $1.5 billion in tolls on these roads, $267 million goes to cover the vast bureaucracy employed to collect these tolls. If we collected these funds via the gas tax, we could save this money. Not only would we be $267 million to the better, but we would then also receive $62 million in federal highway funds, for which we are not currently eligible because they are not available to toll roads.
We could take this $329 million ($267 + $62) savings and apply it to mitigate the increase in the gas tax, or we could use it to improve our roads. Yes, the gas tax would have to increase to make up for the tolls’ elimination, but we would be $329 million annually to the better. That is a lot of money. In the process we would make our roads safer; Connecticut eliminated its tolls for this very reason alone.
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We New Jerseyans have to change our governmental and regulatory culture in order to become attractive again. We are not a state that draws more industry, but rather can’t even hold on to what it already has, as the departure of Mercedes-Benz for a more industry-friendly Georgia shows.
In a way it is understandable how we got here. We were thriving decades back in comparison to many other states; but they, however, buckled down and figured out how they could flourish, while we grew complacent. Now we are forced to change. Our toll roads are just one illustration of the waste we have to eradicate.  
Art Hall
From the Bible:  With my help kings rule, and governors make good laws. Proverbs 8:15