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 PART II. A MASTER PLAN FOR FREE HIGHWAY DEVELOPMENT

THE MOST IMPORTANT HIGHWAY PROBLEMS

The demonstrated improbability of a return from tolls sufficient to recover the costs of constructing and operating six transcontinental highways, such as were described in the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1938, results from the consequences of direct toll impositions. It does not follow that there is not a sufficient traffic to warrant and require facilities of a higher standard than are provided at present. On the contrary, the studies show the potential use of such facilities in many sections is more than sufficient to justify their provision.

The probability that from this traffic there could not be accumulated in tolls the amount required to repay the costs of building and operating the highways arises mainly from the following circumstances inseparable from a toll system:

1. To establish a margin of advantage over competing free highways sufficient to attract a toll-paying traffic, it is necessary to afford conditions conducive to uninterrupted movement, which can exist only if there is a rather long distance between points of access to the highways. The same condition is prescribed by the necessity to hold costs of toll collection to a feasible minimum. Yet these conditions, inseparable from a toll system, automatically exclude as potential toll payers a large number of vehicles moving in approximately the same direction as the toll facility, but for shorter distances than those between the toll-highway access points.

2. Of the remaining traffic of longer range, moving in the same general direction as the proposed toll facility, a large part cannot be counted upon for toll payment because of the financial inability or unwillingness of the operators to pay an additional fee for highway service in the presence of a parallel “free” service afforded by normal public highways of reasonable adequacy.

3. The exclusion of the two traffic groups described leaves, of the total anticipated traffic, a remainder able and willing to pay toll at a reasonable rate. This fraction in practically all cases is too small to support the costs of the desired facility except at a rate exceeding the willingness or ability of even these relatively willing and able Moreover the number of such potential payers potential toll payers. of moderate toll charges is in most instances so reduced as to promise by their diversion from the normal public highways little reduction of the traffic burden that now overtaxes those highways.

Because of these and other related circumstances the net contribution of any toll highways to the service of highway transportation as a whole could not be other than relatively small, even if the roads proposed were constructed and operated at a loss. The bulk of the traffic will continue to use the main public highways, for which it 89