The Fast Lane

Yesterday, Governor Pawlenty unveiled a new plan to create low-density toll lanes on some of the Twin Cities busier commuter routes.

Exactly one femtosecond later, the DFL claimed that the plan would starve children and kill Bambi.

The plan would create toll lanes, which would likely be faster for commuters that want to pay the price. This is a plan that is used in a lot of major metro areas; in Chicago, you can choose between toll and free routes to get between many of the higher-demand areas, with traffic distributed accordingly. In the case of the Pawlenty plan, which would put toll lanes along Interstate 35W (which cuts north/south through the metro via downtown Minneapolis), Interstate 94, Interstate 394 from downtown to the west burbs, a big chunk of the Interstate 494 and 694 ring road, I35E in to St. Paul to the north, and parts of major feeder roads U.S. 10, the dreaded 169 and the always-snagged MN36 to Stillwater.

The staff at the DFL data processing center in downtown Saint Paul fed the punched paper tape into their IBM mainframe with "HIGHWAY" "WAYZATA" "STILLWATER" "TOLL" on it. A few minutes later, the computer spit back:

UNFAIR ADVANTAGE TO WEALTHY
REQUIRES PROMPT SPIN

Which is what they did.

"You're starting to have private enterprise build it and rent it and lease it, where before, it's always been the general public involved in it,'' said Sen. Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar, chairman of the Senate Transportation Policy and Budget Division. "I'm not saying it's a bad idea. It's a Band-Aid to what we really need to do — make a long-term financial investment in transportation and transit that many other states have done.''

While Johnson is the most relentlessly tedious speaker in a MN Senate crowded with snoozers, at least he makes the honest point that it is not the only answer - more on this later.

However, you know you're on to something when Alice Hausman - my "representative" from District 66B in the Midway of St. Paul, a woman who normally only appears in public when the teachers union lets her out for exercise periods - holds forth:

"This administration governs by gimmick,'' said Rep. Alice Hausman, DFL-St. Paul, who sits on the House transportation committees. She said it is impossible to evaluate the plan without information on the amount of the tolls motorists would pay.

Read: "...before we can see exactly how to demigog this thing".

Hausman highlights the hypocrisy of the DFL on this issue: They attack the suburbs, and the subsidy they receive from the urban areas, endlessly and relentlessly - but when the GOP unveils a plan that would shift that subsidy to the consumers themselves (presumably in their H2 Hummers with country club stickers, in the DFL world...), it's suddenly an entitlement of wealth?

I have favored toll routes - lanes or entire roads - for years. They have the singular advantage of making road taxation voluntary, shifting the subsidy for the roads to the actual consumers. This is both a good thing and makes the DFL very angry.

But I also think we need commuter rail (as opposed to the Ventura Administration's dim-witted light rail line), similar to Chicago's Metra system of trains that run on full-gauge ("heavy") rail lines. They make economic sense, in that they dodge the main cost of rail trainsit (the right of way purchases that made the Ventura Trolley so hideously expensive, and will likely inflate the cost of the Minneapolis/St Paul line to ghastly proportion). The two main lines proposed so far - the North Star line from St. Cloud to Minneapolis, and the Red Rock line from Hastings to the Downtowns would both have serious potential to be self-supporting very quickly, especially if they're equipped with used rolling stock. Both of these ideas not only make good transit sense - they are economically sound (unlike every DFL-supported transit plan, or most of Governor Pawlenty's, for that matter).

Jason Lewis did the metro a great disservice with his one-size-fits-all dismissal of all commuter rail transit in favor of roads - and conversations with local Republicans show that the damage, in terms of common sense, was immense. This is an area where conservatives can beat the stuffing out of the DFL on one of their pet issues, and dramatically improve the quality of life in the metro, and do it while upholding conservative principles of free-market discipline and public frugality.

Posted by Mitch at December 30, 2003 06:35 AM