Like most states these days, Oklahoma faces a serious shortage of funds to maintain, repair, and expand its highway system. The principal highway funding sources —state and federal fuel taxes — have not kept pace with inflation, rising construction costs or the extent of driving.

One alternative to either doing nothing or sharply increasing fuel taxes is to use toll finance to pay for new lanes and new roads in areas where demand is greatest. Other states and other countries have had considerable success with public-private partnerships for such toll projects. This is an alternative Oklahoma should seriously explore.

... State departments of transportation have pursued many forms of innovative finance over the past decade. Nearly all of them amount to some form of borrowing against future transportation revenues. But all such methods merely rearrange the timing of existing sources of revenue; they don’t add to the total amount of investment into the highway system.

However, using tolls to finance new lanes or a new highway or bridge is a very different story. We now have a completely new source of funds to pay for particular investments in new capacity. In most cases the use of the new toll lanes will be optional — people have the choice of whether to pay to use them (if the benefits from doing so are worth more than the amount of the toll) or to continue using the existing lanes funded by fuel taxes.

This is being done in other states. The basic model involves a long-term contractual agreement (called a concession agreement) between the investor-owned toll company and the state DOT.

Robert Poole is director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation.