WASHINGTON — The deputy administrator of the Federal Highway Administration said his agency believes that the marketplace will help maintain acceptable tolls on roads operated by private companies.
“We have a lot of faith in the marketplace,” Jim Ray told The Trucker. “I think private operators have in their best interest the need to maximize the use of the facility. An empty facility is not a good thing for them. They want to have maximum use. That means not having absolute gridlock and that means not having an absolutely empty road.”
Tolls are not necessarily the only key to maximizing use, he noted.
“For one thing, they need to be providing a superior service,” he said.
That would include superior asphalt or concrete as well as a debris free road, Ray believes.
“On the Indiana Toll Road, the private operator has employed a car with a large magnet under it that runs back and forth on the road picking up shards of metal and nails and those types of things,” he said.
The Indiana Toll Road is owned by the Indiana Finance Authority and operated by the Indiana Toll Road Concession Company, a Spanish-Australian joint-venture between Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte and Macquarie Infrastructure Group.
“There’s nothing that would have stopped the public owners and operators [the State of Indiana] of that facility to have done that, but they never did,” Ray said. “The question might be why? Well, there might have been the correct incentives, but the folks who run the Indiana Toll Road now have the incentive to provide superior service. They want that road to be as attractive as possible to its users and as such they take special efforts to try to accomplish that. So I think that the marketplace is a powerful instrument here. It brings a rational approach to the operation and use of facilities.”
Ray doesn’t believe that a private operator would ever raise rates to the point that it would drive a large number of trucks off the toll road and onto less safe two-lane and four-lane uncontrolled access highway.
“Now realistically, are you going to hit the sweet spot in the toll rate every single time? In all likelihood, no,” he said. “There will have to be recalibrations. We see that all through other industries.
Ray noted that United Air Lines announced recently passengers checking more than one piece of luggage would have to pay extra for additional pieces.
“The marketplace is going to determine whether or not that is acceptable,” he said. “The competitors, whether it be U.S. Airways or Southwest or whoever are going to have to decide whether or not they are willing to go along and if they don’t the marketplace will adjust and you’ll see United back off. You see that all the time even with their base fares. If one airline creeps up 15 or 20 percent on their rates and their competitors don’t creep up as well, three weeks later the first airline is back down where they were. So this is just the market place working and I think the marketplace is going to work here [toll roads], too.”
Even though contracts with private owners and operators would between a state and the private company, his agency and others within the government will monitor the situation closely, Ray said.
“Obviously have a keen interest in interstate commerce,” he said. “While we believe the marketplace is going to work, we are going to watch things and at the end of the day make sure that freight and people can get across this country in an efficient way is one of our top priorities and that means observing a whole host of things ranging from safety to costs and everything in between.”