Finally, a Plan to Pay for Public Transit With Highway Tolls

Transit and highway authorities often view one another as competitors in the race for urban transport dollars, what with transportation funding increasingly harder to come by, but in metropolitan Tampa they're making a rare go at a partnership. The Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority and Hillsborough Area Regional Transit have teamed up to concoct a new mobility concept that would pay for transit bus operations with expressway toll dollars — an idea being called "bus toll lanes."

"There's a history of each of us working in terms of our own silos and building walls so one can't cross over to the other," says Joe Waggoner, chief executive of the expressway authority, of highway and transit interests. "I'm challenging some of my toll friends and some of my transit friends to think outside their own typical paradigm."