| Toll roads are expensive. They start with higher costs to build. The costs include a massive burden of overhead costs that public freeways don't have. They require extra land acquisition costs to accommodate toll booths and additional toll collection lanes, an entire infrastructure of equipment that includes toll booths, toll machines, cameras, transponders and computers.
Credit to build toll roads comes at higher rates than other government borrowing, since it's not secured by the full faith and credit of the government, but instead by the revenue stream that a toll road will generate.
Then there are the ongoing operational costs, with a small army of toll booth attendants, customer service personnel, billing clerks, payment processing, an armored car service, a cleaning service to clean the toll booths, a personnel department, et cetera.
Not to mention rooms full of expensive shoes and suits - bond consultants, lobbyists, public relations staff, marketing and advertising experts, financial advisers, consultants to estimate traffic and explain why revenue estimates fall short, lawyers, executives, managers, accountants, and a board room full of local elected officials.
Added to this are costs you might not think about, like the bank fees for credit card processing and disaster insurance in case some calamity stops the tolls from rolling in.
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Then there's the final externalized cost to taxpayers. Toll roads only become financially viable if there is sufficient congestion on alternative routes. That's why the 91 Express Lanes' original owners negotiated non-compete clauses, an agreement so onerous that it eventually forced OCTA to buy them out at a profit.
So why have Orange County politicians embraced toll roads and worked so feverishly to prevent the insolvency of the 73 - the San Joaquin Toll Road?
First and foremost is the Republican anti-government ideology. Instead of paying for public goods with taxes, "conservatives" need to come up with some different way of funding public needs that appears to eliminate government funding and those hateful "taxes."
Yet somehow, our local Republicans, adamantly opposed to any tax increase, have no compunctions whatsoever about increasing tolls, which they have done with a vengeance.
On the 73 San Joaquin Hills Toll Road, the tolls have sky-rocketed. Since 2002, the peak hour cash toll at the Catalina toll station has more than doubled, from $2.50 to $5.25. The differential between the cash price and the FasTrak price, which started at a quarter in 2003 has tripled to $ .75. In the same period, the Consumer Price index has risen around 21%. Tolls are one of the few places where politicians can raise fees indiscriminately without voter approval.
The biggest fraud conservatives have used to justify private highways is that user fees are only paid by those who use the roads. That hasn't proven to be the case.
In fact, drivers on the Foothill/Eastern toll road have been subsidizing the Newport Coast users of the 73, and all drivers pay with increased congestion when higher tolls force more cars back onto the freeways or onto arterials.
Secondly, it's a way for local projects to jump to the front of the line of other needed projects, without any independent cost-benefit analysis to the proposed roads.
Third, and most importantly, it's a boon to developers who want to open up raw land for development in deals that are far more favorable than they would get from Caltrans.
Finally, though, it's about not admitting that this experiment is an abject failure, and that Orange County taxpayers are once again going to pay the price for a massive failure of conservative ideology.
The saga continues in these installments
The Wreck of the 73 - The Looming Insolvency of the San Joaquin Hills Toll Road (Part 2)
The Phantom Zombie Toll Road above (or below) the Santa Ana River San Joaquin Hills Toll Road (Part 3)
241 South - Waterloo for the OC Power Structure (Part 4)
The Best of Tolls, The Worst of Tolls - the 91 Express Lanes (Part 5)
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