Editorial: Truck Toll Lanes Aren't In The Stars
Roanoke Times, 5/9/06

Key lawmakers want VDOT to halt negotiations with Star Solutions to add toll lanes to I-81. The governor should lead the movement.

Long gone are the days, thankfully, when politicians and road builders got out a map, decided which towns to favor with interchanges, then poured concrete from Point A to Point B.

That type of highway building failed to consider how people and their goods travel now and into the future, and it gave little thought to unintended environmental or economic consequences.

That's why, at the public's insistence, the federal government devised a long and involved permitting process. State transportation officials must demonstrate a need for a project, such as alleviating safety and congestion problems along Interstate 81, then impartially evaluate an array of options. That's not happening along I-81.

Gov. Tim Kaine should direct the Virginia Department of Transportation to stifle the preconceived notion that Star Solutions offers the only answer: four truck-only toll lanes.

VDOT's environmental study hasn't backed the Star Solution plan as the best solution, yet VDOT continues to promote the alliance. Last week a group of key lawmakers whose districts fall along the corridor requested that VDOT step away from the negotiating table.The transportation agency responded that it isn't a done deal. Now, Kaine needs to make sure that it isn't for several reasons:

* The study low-balled the amount of truck traffic that would avoid paying tolls and use alternative routes -- the incentive for which continues to grow when profits dwindle during fuel cost spikes. The Virginia Trucking Association cites a study that concludes U.S. 11 truck traffic would double, thereby shifting congestion and safety problems to a road ill-equipped for the overflow.

* The study failed to consider, as the federal government has urged, the congestion-alleviating, fuel-conserving intermodal transportation concept of moving freight by ships and rail as well as trucks.

* The Star Solution proposal -- expected to cost between $13 billion and $19 billion -- failed to gain the federal funding anticipated, receiving just $100 million of the $800 million sought.

* The environmental study indicates that only those sections of I-81 near urban areas would benefit from four additional lanes.

* Most important, the governor and senators are locked in a budgetary stalemate with Republican delegates over the future of transportation in Virginia.

Until financing for a comprehensive, long-term transportation plan is approved, the state would be foolish to rush into a project with Star Solutions that has neither the money nor the public support needed to complete it.