Toll Roads Could Be Alabama Highway Funding Answer

A toll booth could be headed to a highway near you, as federal and state highway funding dollars could run dry by the year 2010, according to experts.

Currently federal and state highway funding comes from gasoline taxes, but in just two years the taxes collected will not meet costs for projects nationwide.

One alternative source of funding is toll roads that are built and maintained through a public, private partnership.

“All these large project planned in the future can only come with private investment, there is not enough money in public coffers to do these,” said Mack Roberts vice president of American Roads, a company that runs four private toll roads in Alabama.

The public, private partnership works because the costs of multi-million dollar road construction projects are shared.

In one example, a toll company would pay leasing fees to the state for a set period of years to operate a toll on a state highway. 

Those leasing fees can climb into the hundreds of millions of dollars, all of which go into state transportation coffers for road construction.

The private company is then responsible for the maintenance of the highway around the toll, but to make the partnership desirable the private company is allowed to keep all the money paid out at the tolls themselves.

The Alabama Department of Transportation is already acknowledging the growing importance of toll roads with its Division Engineer in Birmingham confirming that a planned elevated roadway along Highway 280 will be a tolled system.

“Things have come around now where there is not enough money out there to maintain the facilities we have so we’ve come back to privatization.  We’ve come full circle,” said Mack Roberts, vice president of American Roads.