Toll increases an unwelcome yearly tradition

It’s become a New Year’s tradition right up there with pork and sauerkraut, but a lot harder to stomach. We’re talking about Pennsylvania Turnpike toll increases.

Today the rates go up for the 12th consecutive year. As of this morning, tolls will rise 6 percent. Motorists driving passenger vehicles with EZ Pass will see rates rise from $1.40 to $1.50 on the most common tolls. Cash customers will see rates rise to $2.50 on those same routes, according to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission.

These increases have added up over the years. Since 2014 tolls for E-Z Pass customers have gone up 44 percent; while tolls rise by 56 percent for cash customers.

The impact of these increases is brutal on commuters, truckers and others who drive on the highway regularly. Common local commutes such as Reading to Harrisburg East and Morgantown to Reading now cost $4 each way with EZ Pass, $5.80 with cash. Make that a round trip a few hundred times a year, and it adds up to serious money.

For long trips, the numbers can be downright shocking. As of today it costs cash customers $53.50 to travel the full turnpike from east to west.

It costs $38.40 for E-Z Pass customers. Cheaper, but hardly a bargain. The costliest route is from the northernmost part of the turnpike’s Northeast Extension to the highway’s western terminus: a whopping $61.60 with cash or $44.20 with EZPass.

The worst part of all is that there’s no end in sight. Pennsylvania’s Act 44 of 2007 requires the Turnpike Commission to pay $450 million per year to PennDOT through 2021 to cover the cost of roads and other transportation infrastructure projects. After that, the commission’s payments for transportation priorities beyond its purview will be reduced to $50 million per year through 2057. That means steady toll increases for another 37 years.

Act 44 had been enacted with the understanding that Pennsylvania was going to toll Interstate 80 to fund transportation projects across the state. That never happened, and turnpike users are bearing the brunt of the impact.

The state is able to get away with this because many people have no choice but to use the turnpike. And with E-Z Pass, motorists may not even realize how much they’re paying unless they read their credit card statements carefully. If the turnpike commission succeeds in an other of its initiatives, no one will be paying cash on the turnpike by the end of 2021.

It’s abundantly clear that state leaders want to generate as much cash as possible from turnpike motorists, many of whom are from out of state, than turn to even less popular means such as tax increases or cuts in other programs and services.

What we have here is a recipe for disaster. As tolls keep rising, people are going to be less likely to use the road or even do business in Pennsylvania. Auditor General Eugene DePasquale warned this year that the turnpike is alienating customers with years of toll hikes, yet it’s still carrying an unsustainable debt load. Taxpayers are likely to feel pain one way or another.

It’s all part of the larger transportation funding mess in Harrisburg. Motorists are paying high turnpike tolls, much of which does toward work on other projects and to pay interest on debt, and they’re hit with one of America’s highest gas taxes, yet much of that revenue goes toward funding state police instead of taking care of transportation infrastructure.

There’s no easy fix here. The turnpike commission’s debt isn’t going away, and PennDOT is struggling to fund its obligations as it is.

But it is just wrong to lay so much of the burden on people in the parts of the state that rely on the turnpike. Folks who don’t live in the southern half of the state or along the route from Montgomery County to the Poconos aren’t paying their fair share.

It’s time for state lawmakers and the governor to finally develop an honest, straightforward approach to this problem. For too long our leaders have been playing a shell game in which turnpike users come out as losers year after year.