One thing you can’t say about Gov. Jon Corzine is that keeping his office is more important than his vision for the future.
The governor is proposing to hike tolls on the N.J. Turnpike and Garden State Parkway by 50 percent in 2009 — the year he is expected to seek re-election. That’s a gutsy move, consider how unpopular his earlier toll-hike plan was.
The governor’s plan, which is expected to be unveiled by the N.J. Turnpike Authority next week, would use the added cash for transportation upgrades.
If enacted, it would mean the cost of a typical 23-mile trip on the Turnpike would jump from $1.20 to $1.80 next year. It would rise to $2.70 in 2012 and reach $3 after 2023.
Tolls on the Garden State Parkway would rise at a similar pace. The current average of 35 cents per passenger car would rise to 50 cents next year, 75 cents in 2012 and reach 85 cents in 2023. The hikes would be the first since 2000 and would be used to widen the Turnpike and Parkway, invest $1.25 billion in a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River and repair and replace decrepit bridges.
The proposal will be a difficult one to sell, but it has support from the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a nonpartisan transportation and environmental group that advocates for mass transit and using money to maintain existing infrastructure, which believes that it should be scaled down and the highway widenings eliminated. It says that the “plan ultimately falls short by including $3.3 billion for wasteful expansions of these two roads.”
“This plan recognizes that Access to the Region’s Core is essential to New Jersey’s economic vitality and will help reduce traffic congestion throughout the state,” said Kate Slevin, Executive Director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a regional policy watchdog organization. “But chaining it to wasteful, old-fashioned, and poorly planned road projects is the wrong move.”
The Turnpike Authority has not made the case that the Turnpike or the Parkway widening projects are needed. As currently designed, neither will provide long-term congestion relief. In fact, according to state data, parts of the new lane on the Parkway will be filled with traffic as soon as construction is complete. Alternatives like congestion pricing and cashless tolling have not been examined in the environmental documents, though they could provide long-term traffic relief at a fraction of the cost of highway expansion.
“Decades of road widening have shown that highway expansion doesn’t ease traffic congestion in the long run. New Jersey needs projects that look to the future, not the past,” said Slevin. Alternatively, the Campaign recommended a smaller toll increase to pay for necessary road maintenance and bridge repair and ensure that the ARC tunnel remains on track.
NJ Future also is backing the plan. A press release quoted NJ Future Executive Director Peter Kasabach, called “the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) tunnel project and continued improvement and expansion of our mass transit system toward sustaining and enhancing our state’s economy, environment and quality of life.”
We welcome the Turnpike Authority’s proposal to use new funding proceeds for both the Trans-Hudson tunnel project and funding for mass transit.
Fiscally, the proposal makes more sense than the earlier plan to borrow against tolls to pay debt, but I think in the end it asks Turnpike drivers to foot the bill for improvements that probably should be paid for by a larger swath of people — through a gas tax increase, through development fees, etc.
But as practical as this plan may be, the politics may trump things in the end. The Legislature plans hearings on it — though it is not directly under the Legislature’s control — and the governor will have to run his re-election campaign with the toll hikes fresh in voters’ minds.
One thing is for certain, though, the state needs to fix its infrastructure sooner rather than later. We don’t need to have another Minneapolis bridge collapse and, while the business lobby might claim otherwise, the business community is more likely to flee a state with aging and nonfunctional infrastructure than it is a state that has to ask its businesses to pay a little more in taxes.
Hank Kalet 