Charging tolls keeps taking a toll When campaigning for governor in 2001, then-candidate James E. McGreevey talked about taking the tolls on the Garden State Parkway down by 2007. We’re about halfway through that six-year time frame, but the tolls are nowhere near halfway to being removed. If anything, the notion of a parkway without tolls is further off than ever. Last week Gov. McGreevey announced a plan to take down some tolls on the parkway, but make no mistake, this is in no way a step along the path to getting rid of parkway tolls. Quite the opposite is true. The plan the McGreevey administration announced last week, taking the northbound tolls off the Raritan plaza and the southbound tolls off the Asbury Park plaza is a plan to keep tolls on the parkway for as far into the future as anyone can see, and probably a good while beyond that as well. To be fair, the plan should speed up the ride for commuters who use the road, but its $45 million price tag ensures that the state has 45 million more reasons to keep the tolls in place. While the poor saps who fork over cash every month for the privilege of using E-ZPass will have the pleasure of a less interrupted drive on the parkway. Those who don’t subscribe to the state’s toll road passport program will probably find using the road far less convenient, even with one less toll. People who continue to pay the toll the old-fashioned way, i.e., by paying only when they need to, will find themselves queuing up the same way they do now, except it will probably be worse because there will be fewer exact change and toll-taker attended lanes. The tolls on the parkway lead to accidents, wasted time, pollution and wasted gas. There’s no way to get around that. A study of the parkway published last year in Transportation Quarterly, a journal focusing on transportation issues across the country, placed the cost of collecting parkway tolls at more than 37 cents for each dollar. People can argue about the accuracy of that figure, but there is no disputing the tolls come, with and create, costs not associated with freeways. Cutting out one stop along the way will certainly reduce the problems the tolls cause, but if state officials can see the advantages in taking down some toll booths down, shouldn’t they be able to figure out that taking more down would do even more good?