Procrastination price is a $3 Midtown toll

WE NOW HAVE a firm price tag for Richmond’s intransigence.

It’s $2 billion — the cost of building a new tube at the Midtown Tunnel and for refurbishing the Downtown Tunnel. It’s $2 or $3 each way for every car that passes under the Elizabeth River, between $6 and $9 for a tractor-trailer.

That’s the bottom line of the proposal made last month by Swedish construction giant Skanska and Macquarie Financial Holdings Limited to the Virginia Department of Transportation.

With no other prospects, and with Richmond unable to find any money for transportation, the proposal from Elizabeth River Crossings LLC may be the region’s only hope for opening some of its worst bottlenecks. The Midtown carries 35,000 cars on the most overwhelmed two lanes in Virginia. The Downtown carries 95,000 on four.

Under its proposal, the company would collect tolls — which would rise over time — for 50 years on the tunnels and on the Martin Luther King Freeway extension.

“This is a serious bid from a quality team of firms,” Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim said. “It is a proposal that we must consider seriously.”

What Fraim didn’t add but could have is that Hampton Roads must consider the proposal because we have no other choice.

For nearly a decade, Hampton Roads and Richmond have tried in earnest to find money and will to expand a road system that has been inadequate for far longer than that.

A 2002 referendum would’ve raised the sales tax by a penny and would have been sufficient to build without tolls all the major bridge and tunnel projects, including the Third Crossing and an Interstate 460. But it failed to pass thanks to lobbying by some of the same politicians who cobbled together the transportation compromise last year.

That legislation, of course, was eventually ruled unconstitutional, leaving Virginia with no mechanism to finance highway improvements and with legislators no longer interested in finding one.

The trouble is that Hampton Roads is made up of cities that must cross the water to unite, has an economy based on moving goods from west to east and back again, and must have some way to escape natural or terrorist disaster.

Instead, we’re left with one lone proposal to fix two inadequate highways, financed by levying punishing tolls on everyone wanting to drive between Portsmouth and Norfolk.

This is no criticism of Skanska or Macquarie.

If they are willing to risk their own money to fix our roads, they deserve a decent financial return on their investment. But without state money to help reduce the toll burden, Hampton Roads commuters will be left paying $2 or $3 each way. At that price, the tunnels become financial barriers rather than ties between cities.

And so we may finally have a firm bill for Richmond’s incompetence — the $2 billion it will cost to build and renovate the Elizabeth River crossings, the $2 or $3 it will cost commuters morning and night. The real problem is that if we truly want to fix Hampton Roads’ highways, this is only the first bill of many still to come.