Spare change in the cupholders of our cars used to go pretty far, like for a trip from Lewiston to Portland, but not for much longer. A toll increase is a foregone conclusion for the Maine Turnpike come February.

Arguments against it are too familiar: the Maine Turnpike Authority (MTA) is redundant against the Department of Transportation, its spending is wasteful, and, hey, wasn’t this road supposed to be paid off 30 years ago?

(In the interest of full disclosure, I was once employed by the MTA.)

As with most debates in Maine, the public and elected leaders retreat to their corners and get ready to fight. It is hard to believe that whenever something is proposed, every interest group starts suffering more than everyone else, so ultimately we cater to everyone and end up with nothing.

Isn’t that how sausage is made?

Residents of York County are enraged over the cost to travel from York to Wells on the Turnpike. Portland-area residents cannot believe they pay so much to travel one mile. And residents of Lewiston-Auburn feel taken because we pay more to travel to Portland than most other communities.

All this debate gets us about tolls is griping about who pays, why others don’t pay enough and what happens when politics gets into long-term transportation funding.

What, you say? What does long-term transportation funding have to do with being ripped off with tolls?

It’s simple, but requires a bit of history.

Back when the notion of a user-fee based highway system came along, in the 1940s, Maine already spent nearly half of its revenue on roads, bridges and infrastructure. Even with that fact, some wise legislators believed, whenever possible, the costs of government services should be passed to users. With a controlled-access highway, you could charge users and use the money to build and maintain the road.

After World War II, though, national sentiment was these highways could be free, if the federal government paid for them. So on came the interstate. This explains, in part, why the Turnpike remains tolled. The “free” highway came later, compliments of Washington, D.C.

The missing part of the “free” equation is that roads and bridges, unfortunately, don’t live forever and require rehabilitation and reconstruction after a period of time.

In the case of toll roads, of which the Maine Turnpike is but one of hundreds throughout the United States, there is a dedicated revenue stream for maintenance, but also the critical rebuilding once it has reached the end of its life. The widening and modernization of the first 40 miles of I-95 in Maine is an example; users paid for the project..

How does this play out on the rest of Maine’s interstate system?

The rebuilding of I-295 South over the summer was funded through bonds and backed by gas taxes, not user fees. Everyone who filled up at the pump paid for the road from Portland to Augusta, via Brunswick, to be rehabbed, including those who already pay user fees for the Turnpike.

And then, while on a visit with other governors and President-Elect Barack Obama, Gov. John Baldacci turned over a list of projects ready for federal bailout money that included another $40 million to rehab more of I-295.

For a state that once spent half of its revenue on infrastructure, we now spend barely 10 percent and must plead for federal handouts to offset our inability to set priorities.

Maine can’t have part of the state paying to maintain an highway, with another looking for bailouts to pay the bill.

Maybe if we stop complaining about the extra quarter per trip to Portland, or the couple dollars to save an hour on busy Route 1 in the summer, we might realize our roads and bridges are falling apart.

And there is no plan to reset our priorities.

Jonathan LaBonte, of New Auburn, is a columnist for the Sun Journal. E-mail: [email protected].