Virginia Submits Application for I-95 Tolls as Trucking Industry Continues Opposition

This story appears in the Sept. 3 print edition of Transport Topics.

Virginia officials submitted an application late last month to the federal government seeking formal permission to toll Interstate 95, while the trucking industry and other opponents continued to push back against it.

Virginia said in the application for the Interstate System Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Pilot Program that tolling I-95 is essential to its economic vitality and the safety of motorists.

“Tolling on I-95 will better enable the commonwealth to sustain a balanced and enhanced funding program to address the backlog of maintenance and new capacity projects,” Sean Connaughton, Virginia’s secretary of transportation, wrote in a letter to Victor Mendez, administrator of the Federal Highway Administration.

States cannot usually put new tolls on existing interstate highways, but the federal pilot program allows FHWA to grant permits for up to three tolling programs. North Carolina and Missouri have also been given conditional approval for tolling projects, pending successfully completed applications.

Virginia wants to put a single tollbooth on I-95 near the North Carolina border. The booth would collect $12 per truck each way (7-2, p. 2).

Days after Virginia’s application became public, American Trucking Associations called the plan “wrong for Virginia and for the country.”

“I understand, perhaps as well as anyone, the struggles states have in paying for infrastructure, but tolls are not the ‘conservative solution’ to the problem,” ATA President Bill Graves said in an Aug. 28 statement. Graves is a former two-term Republican governor of Kansas.

“At a time when many in this country are looking to limit the size of government, creating an entire bureaucracy to collect a toll, a bureaucracy that then needs to be paid for from those same tolls, is just wrong,” he said.

Graves suggested that a 1-cent increase in the state’s fuel tax would provide the funding Virginia has said it needs.

While 99 cents of every fuel tax dollar go to transportation projects, toll collection is far less efficient, Graves said, adding that it will cost $95 million in the first six years of tolling for Virginia to collect the funds.

In the application materials Virginia made public on Aug. 24, the state said the toll amounts to about 2 cents per mile for cars traveling the 179-mile stretch of I-95 within the state, far lower than other states that have

I-95 toll charges. The per-mile charge for trucks would be about 7 cents.

The tolls will generate $1.14 billion for Virginia in the first 25 years of operation, the state estimated.

“Toll revenues will enable the commonwealth to accelerate the highest-priority capacity, maintenance and safety projects in regional transportation plans,” Connaughton said in a video that accompanied the appli-cation. “Without toll revenues, these projects will not be funded.”

Gregory Whirley, VDOT’s commissioner of highways, said in the video that in the first six years of tolling, Virginia would replace four I-95 bridges and rehabilitate 75 lane-miles of the highway in its southernmost section.

“We want to make improvements that will reduce fatalities and injuries,” he said.

However, a business and local government coalition opposed to the project called Republican Gov. Bob Mc-Donnell’s assertion that the state needs tolls “clearly misinformed.”

“The governor is trying to ram this through without fully understanding the consequences on the commonwealth as a whole,” Peggy Wiley, chairwoman of the Greensville County Board of Supervisors, said in a statement published by Virginia Toll-Free I-95. The highway runs through Greensville County.

Virginia expects to hear from FHWA by Sept. 21. If all goes as planned for the state, officials hope to finish the requirements for the federal program by January and start planning to build tolling infrastructure shortly thereafter.