What exactly are we talking about here? Are we going to financially rescue Connecticut with highway tolls? Or in fact, are we talking about how to maintain and upgrade the highway system with tolls? With some additional specificity, I am going to try to tackle the latter.
There is one universal truth in this country. People dislike traffic and locally, people tend to think they have the worst of it. I have heard it in virtually every state. Politicians generally march this rhetoric forward because the pressure is intense. Failing to act or acting unconcerned doesn't exactly help a politician get re-elected. Thus traffic claims it's place in the politician's repertoire. In researching this article, I read what a few local politicians had to say. It wasn't hard to figure out what that might be. My initial goal in researching this article was to try and find information that tended to prove or disprove local opinion. That is to say, are Connecticut roads and congestion all that bad? Are Connecticut residents teetering on the edge of motoring purgatory? Where on the highway bell curve, does Connecticut stand? Here is what I could find.
The National Transportation and Safety Board as well as the Department of Transportation that later transformed into the Federal Highway Administration are utterly useless when trying to determine where any state ranks nationally on road quality. They don't rank state by state highway systems. I refused to rely on the biased accounts of any particular state's transportation department. They are simply unreliable and self serving. They also do not have the data or knowledge to rank themselves against the road quality of the other 49 states. I was thus reduced to two "user" type surveys. The first one, the "Reason Foundation", ranked Connecticut roads 39th in "overall performance" which was a weighted average of several factors. It ranked Connecticut 2nd lowest in the least amount of traffic fatalities per mile traveled. My second source of information came via the truckers magazine, "Overdrive" which polls truckers each year. I consider truckers the most knowledgeable of all drivers in this particular category and thus what they have to say I consider fairly reliable. They actually travel all 50 states and do so regularly and unlike paid employees or politicians of any given jurisdiction, they stand nothing to gain from their answers. I sampled results from various years. Connecticut never made any of the bad highway rankings. Those consistently receiving poor marks were Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, and in virtually every category, California. Once in awhile, I actually found a very positive remark regarding Connecticut's roads.
The net effect of all this research? Connecticut roads are not on the verge of collapse. There are at least ten states in far worse shape, perhaps more because the data is so unreliable and subjective. So how do we improve infrastructure? What is the funding mechanism?
Very likely it will end up being a pooling of various revenue sources. Increasing the gas tax and electronic tolling are the most obvious. Increasing fees on auto registrations, perhaps targeted tolling. What politicians don't understand is that the American taxpayer is on the verge of collapse, not our highways. Taxpayers are sick of watching government waste money and never rein in spending. Studies support that in economic downturns, government lays off less than one employee for every four laid off in the private sector. Government continues to chug along, picking the pockets of every taxpayer as though it never has an alternative. People in Connecticut and all over the U.S. are sick of having their pockets picked by a bunch of government employees and politicians that have become one trick ponies. Government it seems, never considers leaning out inefficiencies, toppling overpaid and duplicitous structures, eliminating wasteful spending to non profits, or looking for alternatives. The answer is always the same. Increase taxes. One day, politicians might actually figure out that taxpayers have had enough. I hope that day comes soon.