The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
COLIN MCENROE
The last resosrt — just toll the rich
Back to the drawing board?
The murmurs emanating from the Democratic Senate caucus over the last week suggest that even scaleddown Connecticut tolls are a nogo, which is fitting, because so is traffic, a lot of the time.
But tolls are also sort of a zombie transportation policy. You kill them. They’re dead. And the next thing you know they’re back up, lurching around the landscape and groaning, “Eeeeeezeeeeeeepaaaaaassssss.”
The biggest obstacle to Gov. Ned Lamont’s comprehensive transportation plan is that people don’t use transportation comprehensively. They use little pieces of it. And they only care about those pieces.
Connecticutions are notably crabby about any public transportation expenditure that doesn’t directly benefit them. They spit on CTfastrak or fixing the Waterbury bottleneck because that’s not where they drive.
What the average Connecticution wants is a monorail with a stop just far away from his house that he doesn’t feel intruded upon but close enough so he can walk there. The monorail must then travel directly to his place of work. And by the way, he lives in East Windsor and works in an office park in Farmington and his wife works an office park in Glastonbury, so the monorail damn well better go there too.
And let’s be clear: if it doesn’t go to those places but does go to other places, it’s a porkbarrel boondoggle — a porkdoggle? — by those ratlicking jerks at the State Capitol.
One obstacle to comprehensive planning is contained in the above example. Time was, jobs were heavily concentrated in cities and you could run buses and trolleys and rail from where people lived to where they worked.
There’s an enormous body of conspiracy theory and urban legend concerning the role the auto and petroleum industries played in the destruction of electrically powered streetcars and trolley lines. Like a lot of these things, it’s about 28 percent true. It’s also the plot of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”
If you were to reinstall those lines now, they wouldn’t work, because commuting has become a metaphor for America: we don’t all want to go in the same direction anymore.
Assuming Lamont’s CT 2030 plan — which was not terrible — is dead on arrival, what next?
The carclogged road seems to fork in two directions.
One is a transportation strategy driven by moral choices. I could easily stop there, right? There’s no way we’re doing it. But just for hahas: this would involve trying to plug into the Green New Deal. You’d pick winners and losers. The winners would be public transportation and low emission vehicles. The loser would be the lone driver with a 45mile commute in his internal combustion powered car.
This option would require potent national and state leadership, with the goal of convincing Americans we’re in a war against a deadly enemy (ourselves). We’d pour our national economic might into the reshaping of dwelling and job locations along public transit lines. Getting 300 people out of their cars would be akin to winning a military battle.
I don’t see it happening. The idea of living sustainably and prioritizing the quality of life of our children and grandchildren is, for some reason, deeply offensive to half of our electorate.
The other option is what I would call Gilead Lite, a reference to the dystopian and deeply stratified society that supplants the United States of America in two novels by Margaret Atwood.
Here it is useful to look at some of the projects funded by one of the federal programs Lamont is hoping to use: the Build America Bureau. The Bureau has shown a fondness for High Occupancy Toll (HOT) Lanes often build as publicprivate partnerships (where a private company builds a project in return for some or all of the revenue it generates).
A HOT Lane project works by offering new, congestionfree lanes to vehicles carrying at least three people or to motorists willing to pay a toll price. The price floats up and down depending on how full the lanes are. The driver trying to get to work at the time of highest congestion might pay $5 to $8 oneway.
And note: the system has to charge fairly high rates, because the whole concept falls apart if too many drivers opt in. (An analogy would be the fees charged for TSA PreCheck and Global Entry. They exist partly to prevent mobs of people from using the service, which then loses its value.)
The drawbacks are obvious. It creates a class of people who can afford a better version of a public asset and another group — “the econoclass” in Atwood’s Gilead — who must use the lesser version (which presumably is made a little bit better by getting the rich people out of the mix). It is also mostly not very green.
Maybe this second strain of thinking will fly in Connecticut. If you really hate tolls, you could always drive and not have to pay them. But the rich people would get to drive faster.
Happy motoring.