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Editorial: We feel your pain

Residents of localities along the I-95 corridor on Virginia’s southern border—we feel your pain.

Gov. Bob McDonnell has proposed placing tolls on the highway near Emporia to help pay the state’s share of interstate maintenance. The proposal, and the negative response it has generated from residents opposed to the idea, are all too familiar to folks here in the Middle Peninsula, who are still shelling out 85 cents (or $2 for those without an E-ZPass transponder) for a "temporary" toll to cover the construction bonds for a bridge widening project that took place 16 years ago.

About a decade after that project, VDOT constructed two beautiful new spans crossing the Pamunkey and Mattaponi rivers at the Town of West Point—with no tolls. Also consider that the West Point bridges cost about $30 million more than the Coleman Bridge project.

That gets to just one of the inequities of tolls. While it’s a user tax, it’s an unfair one. Why should commuter...

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