In July, Georgia Commissioner of Transportation Harold Linnenkohl announced to the State Transportation Board a tentative plan to add an east-west highway to ease congestion north of Atlanta. The connector, which could be a state road or an interstate, would pass through a burgeoning area near Lake Lanier. If approved, the northern east-west connection would be the latest in what some local and state officials call the future of road building: toll roads that are initially funded by public-private partnerships (PPP).

Although acquiring the right of ways for the project will be challenging, finding the money to build it could be a potential deal-breaker. “Here in Georgia, we are facing a $7.7 billion transportation funding shortfall over the next six years,” Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) spokeswoman Carrie Hamblin says. “Certainly finding a way to pay for a project of this magnitude is first and foremost on our minds.”

Using a PPP, the state can solicit a company to pay the initial cost of the project and then use the toll money to pay back that investment. “We're just looking at a way to provide the infrastructure that we need,” Hamblin says. “Georgia is a growing state [with] growing needs.”

Toll roads on the rise

Georgia is not the only state turning to PPPs and toll roads to handle increased traffic. According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), 21 states allow the use of PPPs to fund transportation projects. Also, since the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) in 1991, 27 states and one territory have implemented major toll road operations, according to the August 2006 FHA study “Current Toll Road Activity in the U.S.: A Survey and Analysis.”

States are using PPPs and tolls to raise revenue and handle the increasing cost of building and maintaining new infrastructure, says Jack Basso, chief operating officer for the Washington-based American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “Especially if it's ‘green field’ projects, meaning new construction, it's a way of generating the necessary revenue to get those facilities built a lot faster than you can do them in the traditional way, where you have to build up a lot of capital over a lot of years and you're being chased [by inflation] the whole time you're building that capital,” he says.

The “Current Toll Road Activity in the U.S.” study shows that 168 toll projects planned or implemented since ISTEA could provide up to 14,565 lane miles of capacity to the nation's highway system. Also, the study projects that toll road development will increase from 50 to 75 miles per year between 1991 and 2001 to 150 miles per year for the next 10 years. Finally, the study's authors reach the conclusion that “we may be on the verge of transitioning to a robust mix of highway funding options in which tolls play a significant role.”

Facing the consequences

While most toll roads are state-owned, local officials may experience “unintended consequences” when the roads pass through their areas, says Tony Giancola, executive director of the Washington-based National Association of County Engineers (NACE). “One of the unintended consequences is the fact that there may be parallel local roads or other state roads which are not interstate or big freeway-type roads, which could, in fact, witness … an influx of truck traffic to avoid the tolls,” Giancola says. “These roads could be overwhelmed, not only with congestion but also because they are designed to a different level [and] may not be able to handle the repeated truck traffic that's going over them.” That already happens in some states with toll roads, Giancola says, and drivers of smaller vehicles may do the same, adding to congestion.

In August, the Arlington, Va.-based American Trucking Associations (ATA) filed a comment with GDOT opposing part of the state's Northwest Corridor project because it would include tolled truck-only lanes on parts of Interstates 75 and 575. Along with concerns that the truck-only tolls are unfair to truckers, ATA says it will drive more truckers to use local roads instead of interstates. “We did a study that found that a substantial number of trucks would likely shift to parallel U.S. [Highway] 41 to avoid paying the toll,” says Clayton Boyce, ATA's president of public affairs.

ATA is very concerned that the growing number of toll roads will increase that phenomenon, and it is especially opposed to turning over existing roads to private, profit-driven companies as part of PPPs because that will increase the number of toll roads as private companies seek to recoup their investment, Boyce says.