Toll Truckways: A Win-Win Approach to Increasing Highway Capacity

This article outlines the concept of using toll truckways to increase highway capacity. The author describes an approach that would add new heavy-duty, truck-only lanes along existing Interstates and urban freeways. For safety reasons, they would be separated from general-purpose lanes by concrete barriers, and access and egress would be via flyover lanes. It would also be feasible to allow longer, heavier trucks (called longer combination vehicles, or LCVs) to operate on this separate system of lanes. Some of the benefits of this system include increased truck productivity, reduces emissions, and support for just-in-time deliveries (with reduced traffic problems, schedules would be easier to achieve). The truckways could also support fast and reliable short-haul trips, bypassing freeway congestion. The author then discusses the cost aspects, hypothesizing that, in order to gain these advantages, it would be worth it to a trucking company to pay tolls to use the truckways. The author concludes by considering the public policy challenges of this proposition, including the general ban on using tolls on any portion of the Interstate system that was not grandfathered in when the system was designed, the lack of support from the American Trucking Association and the railroads' trade association, and the realization on the part of state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) that if they use their remaining right-of-way for toll truckways, they will be prevented from adding general purpose lanes.