* Connecticut: Make truckers pay for road damage
--- Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is on the right track when he says he’s considering imposing tolls for big trucks moving on state roads in order to help fund his ambitious 30-year, $100 billion transportation plan... The Federal Highway Administration is currently considering Rhode Island’s plan, while the trucking lobby seeks to block the program in the federal bureaucracy or in court... Large trucks do serious damage to roads and bridges, with some analysts saying they are responsible for as much as 99 percent of the wear and tear, even though they represent less than 10 percent of total traffic volume... But the reality is that trucking hasn’t been paying its fair share for decades. One Washington think tank 10 years ago said that if trucking were to cover all of its direct expenses, including congestion, pollution and highway damage, the per-gallon federal diesel tax would have to be 69 cents (compared with today’s 24.4 cents) and trucks would also have to pay between 7 and 20 cents for every mile traveled... While trucks are vital to our consumer-driven economy, that shouldn’t exempt them from helping pay to maintain the very infrastructure that allows that industry to dominate the freight delivery business... Consumers will end up paying for those tolls through increases in the cost of the products they buy. But the highway damage will occur in any event, and allowing truckers to pulverize state roads without paying tolls unfairly shifts the total burden to state taxpayers. Just as in Rhode Island, the majority of the trucks that travel Connecticut’s roads are simply passing through on the way to somewhere else, but leave behind huge repair bills for state taxpayers... Tolling trucks is a fair and reasonable way to get the vehicles that cause most of the wear and tear on Connecticut’s roads to pay to maintain them...
(Photo: Council busy repairing roads) -- New Hampshire, CONN, USA - The Day, by Howard Abramson - May 01. 2016Labels: infrastructures funds, toll roads debate, trucking industry news USA
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