FOREX NEW YORK COMPANIES

WASHINGTON — Driving onto an Interstate highway? Crossing a bridge on the way into work? Taking a tunnel under a river or bay? Get ready to pay.

With Congress unwilling to contemplate an increase in the federal gas tax, motorists are likely to be paying ever more tolls as the government searches for ways to repair and expand the nation’s congested highways.

Tolling is less efficient and sometimes can seem less fair than the main alternative, gasoline taxes. It can increase traffic on side roads as motorists seek to evade paying. Some tolling authorities — often quasi-governmental agencies operating outside the public eye — have been plagued by mismanagement. And some public-private partnerships to build toll roads have drowned in debt because of too-rosy revenue predictions.

Tolls are hardly a perfect solution. But to many states and communities, they’re the best option available.

“It’s very hard in this environment for states to add capacity without charging a toll because they can’t afford to do it,” said Joshua Schank, president of the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington think tank. “They’re barely able to maintain what they’ve got, and there is an urgent need for capacity.”

Some changes are already under way

WHAT’S NEW

In addition to the tolls allowed on Interstates in 15 states, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, the U.S. has agreed to pilot toll projects on Interstate 95 in Virginia and North Carolina and on Interstate 70 in Missouri.

A commission created by Congress to recommend ways to pay for upkeep of the nation’s transportation system predicted in 2009 that the U.S. will face nightmarish congestion unless it spends more. The commission estimated all levels of government were spending a cumulative $137 billion less each year than is necessary to maintain and expand the current system. Without action, there will be a $2 trillion-plus backlog by 2035, it said.

It’s been nearly two decades since Congress last increased the federal gas and diesel taxes that have historically paid for highways. Meanwhile, the cost of road and bridge construction has gone up and the purchasing power of fuel taxes has declined by more than a third. Revenue is also down because people have been driving less due to the uncertain economy and because cars are becoming more fuel-efficient.

Federal and state fuel tax revenues peaked in 2007 at $72.4 billion, then dropped to $68.6 billion in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available. Meanwhile, state toll collections rose from $4.9 billion in 2000 to $8.9 billion in 2010, and locally administered tolls rose from $1.6 billion in 2000 to $2.5 billion in 2009.

The trust fund that pays for federal highway programs is forecast to go broke sometime next year, though the House and Senate are trying to negotiate a bill to shore up the funding and overhaul transportation programs. It’s unclear whether they’ll reach a deal, but if they do, it’s likely to contain only a short-term financial fix. That means lawmakers will be back again, scratching for more.

EASY WAY OUT?

Tolling is the easiest near-term way to pay the bills, says Robert Atkinson, who chaired the financing commission.

“If you could allow modest tolling on Interstates, you could raise a lot of money,” he said.

Fifteen states, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, that had turnpikes before the 1956 advent of the Interstate system have grandfathered permission to collect tolls on 2,900 miles of the 47,000-mile system. But federal restrictions prevent other states from placing tolls on federal-aid highways except in limited circumstances.

States want Congress to increase their ability to charge tolls and to allow them to use the money for a variety of transportation needs — not just upkeep of the roads where tolls are collected, said Eugene Conti, North Carolina’s transportation secretary, at a Senate hearing last month.

But states also have a history of slapping tolls on roads traveled by a large share of out-of-state motorists. When Pennsylvania applied to put tolls on Interstate 80, a route favored by truckers, the federal government rejected the plan partly because some of the money raised would have gone to support public transit in Philadelphia, even though the highway doesn’t touch the city’s metro area. In 2004, Chicago leased its Skyway, an eight-mile road and bridge, to a private toll operator for 99 years in exchange for $1.8 billion that was used to pay off city debt. The resulting toll increases fell heavily on Indiana commuters who use the road to get to jobs in Chicago.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., has introduced a bill to give the secretary of transportation oversight of tolling practices. The financing commission made a similar recommendation.

What to do about tolling isn’t addressed in the highway bill now before Congress because of a standoff earlier this year between senators who favor and oppose easing tolling on Interstate highways. The issue is expected to be revived next year after the retirement of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, who has led the opposition to greater tolling.

One concern is that the Interstate system is aging, which means money must be found to repair and replace the roads.

“The roads are out there and we’ve paid off the mortgage, but that doesn’t mean the system is paid for. ... Now the roads are crumbling and we have to upgrade them,” said Patrick Jones, executive director of the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association, which represents toll facilities.

ON THE HORIZON

Some relaxation of the ban is in the works. The Transportation Department has selected the three states — Virginia, North Carolina and Missouri — for pilot toll projects.

Under another program, a $2 billion project now under way would add High Occupancy Toll lanes on Interstate 495 in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. The state can’t afford to build the lanes on its own, but money raised by a private investment partnership and a $586 million federal loan made the project possible.

Motorists who buy an E-ZPass that can be read electronically will be able use the lanes. Toll prices will fluctuate depending on traffic density. If toll lanes are crowded, prices will keep rising until enough motorists decide to remain in the slower lanes. The aim is to give motorists a way to travel quickly, but only if they are willing to pay for it — an idea that has stirred controversy. Cars with three or more passengers will be able to use the lanes without paying.

The administrative costs of tolling are far greater than the gas tax, even when using electronic tolling, said Phineas Baxandall, a senior analyst with the private, consumer-oriented U.S. PIRG.

Some tolling agencies could also use “a dose of sunshine,” Baxandall said. Because many are quasi-governmental, public disclosure, open meeting and other transparency rules don’t always apply, he said. As a result, they frequently operate out of public sight, creating opportunities for corruption or manipulation by industry, he said.

According to a report by the New Jersey comptroller in March, cronyism and mismanagement at the Delaware River Port Authority had wasted millions of dollars. The authority operates four bridges, a ferry and a rail line across the Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey recently raised cash fares on six Interstate bridges and tunnels to $12 for cars. By 2015, it will cost a five-axle truck paying cash $105 to cross between New York and New Jersey, three times as much as for any other bridge or tunnel in the country, according to the American Trucking Association. Bill Baroni, the authority’s deputy executive director, told a Senate hearing the fare hikes are necessary to make up for years of neglect and mismanagement.

Despite concerns about more and higher tolls, it’s difficult for lawmakers to tell state and local governments not to pursue greater tolling when Congress isn’t providing a comparable alternative source of funds.

Jones, of the tolling industry association, predicted that as traffic congestion worsens, people “are going to demand, ‘We need better roads, we need more efficiency,’ and they are going to ask for tolling and direct user fees to build the transportation that they need.”

The Olympics are focusing the world's eyes on what used to be a derelict, polluted patch of industrial land near Gold's childhood home but which now is a shining advertisement for east London: the immaculate, landscaped Olympic Park with purpose-built sports venues that smell like a new car. So damn the expense.

"What is happening is immense for east London," Gold says. The Olympics are "bringing the pride back to this part of the world."

Those London Mayor Boris Johnson once described as "Olympo-skeptics" have beaten a steady rhythm of complaint about the $14 billion Britain is spending in an economic recession on games many people couldn't get or afford tickets for. And Britain being a vociferous democracy, critics aren't locked up and shut up as they were in Beijing in 2008.

The Big Brotheresque Olympic security - up to 13,500 soldiers, plus police, security guards, fighter jets, helicopters, warships, surface-to-air missiles and even a "sonic weapon" crowd-control device that emits a dissuasive, ear-piercing beam of sound - also doesn't come cheap and, to some, is a scary reminder that Britain is a target for terrorists.

Street graffiti artists complain their work has been painted over in London's Olympic beautification. Police around the Olympic Park have been given powers to disperse "anti-social" teenage loiterers. Oficers have clamped down on prostitutes and cleaned out their calling cards from London's famous red telephone boxes. And plans to whisk Olympic VIPs and athletes through London traffic on reserved lanes sit uncomfortably in a class-conscious city where opponents dismiss the games as a corporate-sponsored shindig for the rich.

"The Olympics are being used to beat people over the head with," says Joe Alex, who owns a small house next to the Olympic Park and claims that games-related property development, "like social cleansing," is squeezing and pricing modest families out of the area.

"There's a real seedy underbelly. Corporate Olympics have taken over the whole thing," he says. "I don't know anyone who knows anyone who has a ticket."

But finding east Londoners who are thrilled is easy, too. When you look at east London's history, it is not hard to understand why.

The British capital has, in some ways, long been a city divided. Wealth, political power, bridges over the Thames, posh shops and night life were concentrated in its west. The east was where the city sent its filth - in engineer Joseph Bazalgette's sewage network - and crammed in its poor.

It was home to the massive shipping docks that Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe bombed ferociously because they handled one-third of Britain's imports. When Buckingham Palace in the west was bombed in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's mother, the late Queen mother, was famously said to have been almost glad that she could now "look the East End in the eye" and share its suffering.

East London was where stinking industries clustered and where Jack the Ripper slashed and horrified, where Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky visited and where India independence leader Mohandas Gandhi stayed in 1931, preferring to live among the working people and smoke stacks than in a West End hotel.

For those in the west, "the old saying was that you never went east of the Aldgate Pump," a public fountain marking a rough boundary between the city proper and its East End, says Brian Grover, an east Londoner who works at the Museum of London Docklands.

His childhood memories are of swims in the Thames so polluted "we all had boils, ear aches," and of recovering cans of fruit discarded by cargo ships in the flotsam and jetsam of the river.

"You'd always find loads of stuff, amid the dead dogs," Grover says.

East London was also where those from other parts of the city often had no wish or need to go. Gold, the West Ham chairman, joked in this interview that the A13 highway that cuts horizontally through the east into the city's financial heart was enlarged and improved over the years "so people could get through the East End of London faster because nobody actually wanted to stop here."

Gold's father, a small-time criminal, was in and out of prison. After training as a bricklayer, Gold went into business selling erotic books and magazines and, later, developing what is now the Ann Summers empire of sex toy and lingerie stores.

"I clawed my way out of this place and never wanted to come back," he says of east London. "I do now."

Gold hopes to move West Ham into the Olympic Stadium after the games. He was a boy of 7 when the V1 rocket cratered the field and blew off a roof at the soccer club's current Boleyn Ground stadium, further east from the Olympic Park and opposite what was then his house.

"Since that time, my earliest memories of the East End of London is that nothing has been done," he says. "Virtually no investment, no infrastructure."

"And along comes this amazing, amazing, amazing event that has transformed and will transform the East End forever," he said of the Olympics. "The key to the whole thing here, the whole emotion of this, is what they leave behind. And what they leave behind - fingers crossed - is a whole regeneration of a very deprived area."

The West/East divide was true in the other direction, too. For some east Londoners, the west was a world, not a bus ride, away. It was where some went rarely to see the Christmas lights, buy smart clothes or luxury goods they couldn't find in the east but not a place where they necessarily felt at home.

"I didn't know what west London was until I was 16," says Jean Jeffrey, who was born in Guyana in South America and moved 47 years ago with her Portuguese father and Indian mother to the East End. A council employee, she now runs a viewing platform that overlooks the Olympic Park, proudly explaining the changes brought by the games to visitors and busloads of school children.

"I used to feel quite embarrassed about living in east London, even as an adult. I don't anymore because I can see things happening," she says. "It's our time now and that balance is changing now - that balance from west to east."

Stratford, on the edge of and gateway to the Olympic Park, must now be one of the best-connected urban neighborhoods in Europe, served by multiple railway and Underground lines and high-speed trains named after famous British athletes. Government officials talk up Stratford as being part of a so-called "Arc of Opportunity" cutting downward through east London to the Thames.

Not all the changes one sees, like the luxury apartments and gleaming office towers built on the former Thames docks that closed in the 1960s to '80s and became derelict, are Olympic-related. But many who work and live in east London believe development wouldn't be so noticeable without the games.

They "put rocket boosters under it," says Jonathan McShane, an elected councilor in Hackney, one of the east London boroughs hosting the Olympics.

The 600-page candidate file London delivered to the International Olympic Committee when it was bidding for the games said change would still come to east London even without the Olympics but would be "slower, more incremental and less ambitious."

East London's River Lea and adjoining waterways where people drowned unwanted pets, ditched car tires, bicycles and shopping carts, and where Gold swam as a boy - "My mum found out and she went absolutely potty because she was fearful I'd get some terrible disease" - has been cleaned. It cuts through the Olympic Park.

In his memories, "I can see the area, the slums, the railway sidings and the ugliness of the whole thing," Gold says. "Now when I go there, wow, any city in the world would be proud of what is being achieved here. It's not like you're building this instead of building hospitals. We'll still be building our hospitals, we'll still be building schools. This is extra and above, and the legacy is invaluable."