Why are there still tolls on the Massachusetts Turnpike?
BOSTON - The Massachusetts Turnpike was built way back in 1952. It was financed with bonds and paid off with tolls over 30 years.
Forty years later, the toll booths on the Pike are extinct, but tolls are not.
"And the fact of the matter is, if we are being honest with ourselves, these tolls aren't going away any time soon," State Rep. Peter Durant, a Republican from Worcester, told WBZ-TV.
Durant has been pushing to ditch the tolls for years.
"We have the money available that would backfill any lost revenue from there," he said. "I think we need to get rid of those tolls and keep the promises that we made."
"If we were to be equitable, we would add tolls on the north-south routes, so 93 north and south," Durant told WBZ. "There's a lot of traffic that comes up from Braintree in the morning. That's, as we all know is a very congested roadway, that needs a lot of work.
Tolls on the Pike, the tunnels and the Tobin Bridge brought in more than $412 million in revenue last year. Now, if the money from the Pike tolls wasn't coming in, where would the money come from?
There is the gas tax, that every driver pays into.
There's the new infrastructure bill that will bring in $5 billion over 5 years for roads and bridges.
And there's the new millionaire tax - some of that money is supposed to go to roads and bridges.
But lawmakers on Beacon Hill haven't budged on the tolls. They use a loophole to keep them in place. The promise to make the Pike a free road, they say, was only if the road was in good repair.
"Back in 2016-1017, the secretary made a determination that the road was not in a state of good repair and that the tolls would continue. So, that's where we are now," said MassDOT highway administrator Jonathan Gulliver.
He told WBZ the Pike and its overpasses actually need quite a bit of expensive repairs.
"Regardless of how much money we get, there always is a big gap, in terms of what people want transportation to be and what we currently provide," Gulliver said.
But it all seems so unfair. Why should your toll money pay for projects on other highways and how come only drivers on the Pike pay tolls?
First, there's a rule that toll money cannot be spent on other roads, only on other toll roads, like the current Sumner Tunnel project.
Second, all other Massachusetts highways were built with some federal money. The law says those roads aren't allowed to have tolls, all the more reason that the Pike tolls are here to stay.
