Road tolls are about as fun as waking up for 9am church service the morning after a night of drunken Saturday night debauchery (i.e. not), but a new  study from those crazy kids at UCLA and USC suggests toll roads are more fair than traditional taxes. Then again, love and war are the only things actually less fair than traditional taxes.

According to UCLA Newsroom:

The study notes that most forms of transportation finance — fuel taxes, sales taxes and tolls — are regressive forms of taxation in that they burden the poor more than the rich.

"Are tolls regressive? According to this and many previous analyses, yes. But for transport policy, whether tolls are regressive fails to fully address the justice and fairness issues that arise in financing road use," the researchers write. "Using sales taxes to fund roadways creates substantial savings to drivers by shifting some of the costs of driving from drivers to consumers at large, and in the process disproportionately favors the more affluent at the expense of the impoverished."

The researchers suggest that if policymakers are worried about low-income, peak-period commuters paying tolls, one way to address this would be to provide discounted "lifeline" pricing based on income levels, as is done by utility companies for qualifying customers, or provide travel credits to lower-income commuters. Another strategy is to use toll revenues to enhance transit services along the corridor so that people have an alternative to driving on the freeway.

While economists have long argued for "congestion tolls" on efficiency grounds, this groundbreaking new study suggests that such tolls may, surprisingly, increase equity in comparison to raising sales taxes to pay for transportation facilities.
  

UCLA and USC, way to play nice together! But this “groundbreaking new study” can be summarized in three words: common sense, stupid.