EDITORIAL

A costly toll for RI’s roads, and reputation

Posted 10/4/22

With a federal judge ruling that Rhode Island’s truck tolling program — first switched on in 2018 and responsible for generating nearly $100 million in revenue to the state since — …

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EDITORIAL

A costly toll for RI’s roads, and reputation

Posted

With a federal judge ruling that Rhode Island’s truck tolling program — first switched on in 2018 and responsible for generating nearly $100 million in revenue to the state since — was unconstitutional, we can’t help but wonder what implications this has for the future of the state’s crumbling transportation infrastructure.

The truck tolling program was struck down as discriminatory, at least in part, because it made specific concessions for certain types of large trucks, such as dump trucks and larger commercial vehicles, that benefited local companies engaging in intrastate traffic, while inordinately affecting interstate trucks traveling (mostly) through the I-95 corridor on their way elsewhere in the region.

Although state Republicans are gleefully using this ruling as an opportunity to gloat about how they warned of this possibility when the truck tolls were first being discussed, this is hardly an outcome worth celebrating. Taxpayers will be the ones to suffer the consequences of another legal debacle, and the fallout from the loss of a revenue stream that was intended to fix critical infrastructure that we all rely on — regardless of your political color.

While former Governor Gina Raimondo should have to face scrutiny for what the tolling program ultimately turned into, her original proposal did not include that discriminatory exemption which ultimately factored heavily into the judge’s decision to strike down the program in its entirety. That was a General Assembly decision, undoubtedly one that was colored by the influence of powerful local contractors who did not want to bear the costs associated with their trucks traveling on tolled highways to get to jobs within the state.

As happens time and time again, our widespread unwillingness to pony up money to pay for the things we all need in order to live in a functional society has resulted in calamity. Why shouldn’t large trucks — all trucks, local or otherwise — that drive on and cause the most damage to our roads have to contribute towards the continued maintenance and repair of those roads?

Rhode Island is far from the first state to propose using tolls to fund infrastructural maintenance, we just so happened to be (perhaps unsurprisingly) the first ones to try to do it in a way that so clearly favored political insiders and people of influence that it resulted in a Constitutional cease and desist from the federal government.

So where will money come from now to maintain our roads and bridges? Legislators have painted themselves into a corner where tolling passenger vehicles is out of the question. An appeal seems unlikely to reverse the decision already made. Perhaps a revised tolling policy, more equal in its distribution of fees, would cut the mustard — but seeing how unpopular such a concept was six years ago, combined with the recent ruling, we aren’t holding our breath to see that happen either.

With no clear solution in sight, it’s another unfortunate example of Rhode Island making national news for all the wrong reasons.

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