(Press release from John Gilkey)Greetings!
Your business viability could be at risk from Bridge Tolls! Please Attend Tonight's Meeting on the Ohio River Bridges Project at the Holiday Inn Lakeview in Clarksville
One of the most important meetings in recent history concerning the Ohio River Bridges project will be held today from 4 to 8 pm at the Holiday Inn Lakeview in Clarksville. It is imperative that you attend and make your concerns known! Tolls on the I-65 corridor will negatively impact your business!
While the Clark-Floyd Counties Convention-Tourism Bureau is in FULL support of the Ohio River Bridges Project, we are also in FULL opposition to any form of tolls on any of the downtown bridges and in particular the I-65 corridor. Tolls will create an economic barrier that will cost your company business and could have a negative impact on your long-term business survival.
Whether we like to admit it or not, we depend upon Louisville for a huge percentage of our business here on the Sunny Side of Louisville. There is almost nothing that people in Louisville NEED to come to Southern Indiana to buy or do. We need to face it; they have it all on their side of the river. We offer alternatives, options and something different ... but the fact remains that they don't need to come to Southern Indiana to do business.
Transponders have been proposed as a means to allow local residents to pay the smallest toll charge while everyone else will have to pay the maximum rate which will be applied to people tracked by a video surveillance system on the bridges. Consider the likelihood that the only people who will purchase transponders and have them installed in their vehicles and linked to their bank account are the people who absolutely need to come to Southern Indiana on a regular basis. That is a VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE of the people in Louisville. All others will pay the highest toll rate.
Fees of up to $3 in each direction have been proposed. In addition, there will be an administrative fee applied at the time of billing that could run anywhere from $5 to $25 for motorists using the video capture system proposed to avoid toll booths. Bridge groups have said that the rate of people who fail to pay tolls imposed by the video systems is around 40 percent. That is most likely the group of people passing through the area from whom collection efforts would be difficult. Local residents could be forced to pay the fees. Those are your customers!
A proposal has been made to further scale back the project to lessen the cost of the downtown I-65 bridge to the point where it can be financed with existing local and federal dollars. The east end bridge could be fully funded using bonds retired by tolls. I urge you to attend today's meeting and voice your support for this approach. Keeping tolls off the I-65 corridor will reduce the impact of the bridges project on your business and your income.
We need to stand together in this issue as an industry! Tolls on the I-65 corridor will have a negative impact on tourism. And since tourism is our bread and butter, it will have a negative impact on us.
Sincerely,
John Gilkey
Director of Communications
Clark-Floyd Counties
Convention-Tourism Bureau
And for a totally different view, yesterday the New York Times wrote:
ReplyDeleteThere were big fights over whether to close this road or not — but now it is closed, and people got used to it,” he said, alighting from his bicycle on Limmatquai, a riverside pedestrian zone lined with cafes that used to be two lanes of gridlock. Each major road closing has to be approved in a referendum. ...
Store owners in Zurich had worried that the closings would mean a drop in business, but that fear has proved unfounded, Mr. Fellmann said, because pedestrian traffic increased 30 to 40 percent where cars were banned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27traffic.html?_r=1&ref=world
I was surprised to learn that almost half of Zurich's households have no cars. Does that hurt their economy? Zurich is an economically vibrant city with a nominal per capita income approximately three times the per capita in metro Louisville.
The Zurich example is clear: more cars does not equal more economic development.