II.  EXPERIENCE WITH TARGETED TOLLING AND PRICING

The United States has made extensive use and has broad expertise with targeted tolling, but the history of toll use has also been marked by inconsistency. Prior to the Interstate era and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, many of the major highways and bridges/tunnels in the country were funded through toll financing. Examples include the turnpikes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and many of the bridges and tunnels in the New York metropolitan area. After 1956, however, the number of new facilities built as toll roads declined dramatically due to the focus on completing the Interstate system, the availability of federal funding to support investment, and the federal tolling prohibitions that went along with the use of this money.4

In recent years, with the growing gap between highway investment needs and available revenues as well as the development of easy-to-use and relatively inexpensive automated toll collection technology, toll roads and toll lanes have once again become an important means for funding investment in new highway capacity—in the last decade about one-third of all new limited-access lane miles built in the United States were tolled; in states such as Texas and Florida, the share is even higher.5

of these so-called brownfield projects include addition of tolls on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington and the Coleman Bridge in Virginia to pay for reconstruction or expansion and various HOT lane conversions in California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Utah.

Currently, there are 277 state and local toll roads, bridges, and tunnels in 32 states, totaling nearly 5,000, miles of roadway. Several more toll facilities are either in development or under consideration.6 In 2006, these facilities raised a combined total of $17.2 billion in revenues from tolls, bond issues, concessions, and other sources. The toll portion of this total ($9.3 billion) represented 9.9 percent of total federal, state, and local highway user fee revenues (i.e., from motor fuel taxes, vehicles fees, and tolls).7

Although toll roads are usually perceived as only practical in cities and highly populated regions, they have been widely used to finance important system links between large cities by crossing through rural areas in states such as Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and New York. While the majority of U.S. toll roads (by number of facilities) are in urban areas, 52 percent of the country's toll road miles are in rural areas, mostly on the parts of the Interstate system as part of statewide tolling programs, not as part of targeted tolling efforts.8 In addition, several toll road projects have been initiated or developed in recent years in ex-urban areas. For example, Loop 49 in Texas, a 26-mile high-tech toll road loop through the rural areas surrounding the modest-sized city of Tyler, opened in 2006, and the North Texas Tollway Authority is building a toll road on State Highway 121 through rural Johnson County.9

Tolling also has been used extensively outside the United States; at least 46 countries operate toll facilities, with the most advanced examples in some rapidly developing countries.10 For example, 100 percent of expressway miles in Mexico, South Korea, and Indonesia and 94 percent in Argentina are tolled, in large part because their expressway networks were developed relatively recently when automated toll collection technology was cheaper and more feasible.11 In contrast, the United States began building its Interstate Highway System shortly after World War II, before electronic toll collection was available.

To date, cordon pricing has not been implemented in the United States. In 2007, as part of the Urban Partnership Program of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), New York City developed a plan to become the first city in the United States to charge all motorists for driving into its congested core. The New York State legislature, however, declined to pass legislation necessary to authorize the program, in part because of concerns that the plan would be regressive and because they believed that the primary impact would fall on working- class residents outside Manhattan.12

Internationally, cities such as London, Oslo, and most recently Stockholm are using cordon pricing schemes in their city centers both to reduce congestion (or its growth) and to boost revenues for highway and transit improvements. The longest running experience is the Singapore Cordon Pricing program. This system, established in 1975, requires all vehicles entering the central part of the city (roughly 2.5 square miles) to display a window sticker and pay a fee to enter. This has dramatically reduced traffic in the center of the city but has created congestion problems around the periphery of the cordon zone.13

The London experience produced immediate congestion reduction benefits, which diminished with time, but much of the cordon pricing plan included the addition of bus lanes that have constricted available lanes for other traffic. While commercial and passenger vehicle congestion has increased, the average travel time by bus has improved dramatically. In addition, major and planned construction/upgrades have caused some traffic congestion that did not exist prior to implementation of the cordon pricing scheme. Thus, while traffic density and travel times for private vehicles may not have declined (for a variety of reasons), public transit improvements also should figure in the overall evaluation.