Opinion: Would tolls offer relief from highway congestion?

Terry Cowgill lives in Lakeville, blogs at ctdevilsadvocate.com and is news editor of The Berkshire Record in Great Barrington, Mass. Follow him on Twitter @terrycowgill.

Advocates of bringing tolls back to Connecticut’s major highways think they’ve found a better way to approach the problem. And with so-called congestion pricing, they just might be right.

In the last few weeks, talk of congestion pricing to address rush-hour bottlenecks has been all the rage in Connecticut, with transportation officials from Florida, Washington, and California traveling to Hartford and Bridgeport to speak at panel forums about how such methods could not only raise revenues but relieve crowding on the state’s busiest highways during rush hour.

And some of those same officials appeared last week on WNPR’s Where We Live to make the same pitch. They agreed reinstating tolls would be a tough sell considering the state’s history.

State residents who are old enough to remember were horrified at the fiery tractor-trailer crash in 1983 that killed seven people at the Stratford toll plaza on the Connecticut Turnpike. That grisly accident, coupled with complicated formulas for federal highway funds the state received for the reconstruction of the collapsed Mianus River Bridge six months later, put considerable pressure on the state to abolish road tolls, which it did during the O’Neill administration two years after Stratford. At the time, the closing of the toll booths on I-95, the Wilbur Cross and Merritt parkways, and the Charter Oak Bridge cost the state $65 million a year in lost revenue.

See the complete story at CT News Junkie.