Huh-whuh?!

Craig of BUFFALOg presents an interesting letter to The Buffalo News, which in turn refers to a letter that apparently presented a rather odd argument: toll barriers on the thruway are essential because they create jobs. And what jobs are created by toll barriers? What industry is served by the existence of toll barriers? The industry of toll collection, that's what. Oy.

By way of background here, Interstate 90 is a toll road for most of its length in New York State, and is designated here the New York State Thruway. However, the twenty miles or so of I-90 that traverse the Buffalo region are toll-free: there is a toll plaza at the Hamburg (western) side of the region, and another at Williamsville (the Eastern end). Drivers are free to drive the section of the thruway between these two plazas without paying tolls upon exiting.

The current problem is that the Williamsville toll plaza, where I-90 once again becomes a toll road, comes before one of the region's busiest interchanges, at Transit Road. This exit leads to several of Buffalo's wealthiest suburbs (Clarence, East Amherst, Williamsville) as well as a few less wealthy, but still important, ones (Depew and Cheektowaga). So the Williamsville toll plaza poses a substantial annoyance to people commuting to jobs in Buffalo from any of those areas. They either get on I-90 at the Transit Road exit and then have to sit through the Williamsville toll plaza to pay up, or they have to take alternate routes like NYS 33 (itself a very heavily traveled road, given that the Buffalo Niagara International Airport is on it) and deal with slower traffic. Thus a proposal to relocate the Williamsville toll plaza to someplace beyond Transit Road.

There's been quite a bit of opposition to this plan on the part of people whose backyards would probably be affected by a sudden slowdown of I-90 traffic in the neighborhood, but frankly, the benefit of moving the plaza seems pretty clear to me. And just how it would jeopardize the toll collectors is beyond me -- especially with increasing reliance upon things like EZ-Pass and the fact that the Department of Transportation doesn't even staff all of the collection booths anyway, except for peak times.

Frankly, the toll collection industry is one whose shrinkage would, in all likelihood, serve to help economic development here rather than curtail it. Not every job is a sacrosanct duty that must be preserved. Quite an admission from a liberal like myself, but there it is.