From Bill Freeman

“Tennessee faces … a $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion yearly shortfall in infrastructure expenses, according to studies by TDOT and the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations,” reported The Tennessean on Dec. 15. “Projected road costs far exceed revenues generated by the various fuel taxes in place in Tennessee, the primary way the state funds highway projects.”

As a potential strategy to address this problem, Gov. Bill Lee and his administration are discussing the conversion of carpool lanes into toll lanes. But instead of saying they are creating toll lanes where Tennesseans will pay to use the lanes, they are calling them “choice” lanes. The administration claims the “choice” lanes could allow drivers the “choice” to speed by regular traffic when they are in a hurry. 

Some folks may be in favor of “choice” lanes, believing them to create a faster lane, particularly in rush-hour traffic. But this seems off, doesn’t it? 

The same Dec. 15 Tennessean article quotes Tony Dutzik, “a senior policy analyst, focused on transportation and energy with the Frontier Group,” which is “part of the Public Interest Network, a liberal-leaning, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization.” “Tolls provide people with an option in the short run, but what transportation researchers have found is people adapt to traffic,” said Dutzik. “The minute the congestion begins to ease up on the highway, people begin to shift their patterns, and it causes traffic to reemerge, and often it doesn’t help but just causes bottlenecks to move to different points.”

Tennessee Lookout’s Holly McCall recently wrote a piece titled “In Gov. Bill Lee’s Tennessee, ‘choice’ means you have no choice.”  Writes McCall: “Tennessee’s lawmakers believe in choice, alright: They choose when you can have a choice about your health care, your kids’ education and now, if they are successful, how and where you drive.” McCall writes: “The choice you get with toll roads [is] to pay the toll or to get fined if you don’t. If you are averse to forking out cash to drive on a public highway you already support through taxes, you have the choice to meander along rural back roads on out-of-the-way routes to your destination.” McCall adds that “some high-priced, outsourced marketing firm” likely told the governor that “the word ‘choice’ sells better than ‘toll roads.’ ”

A good spin on negative news can sometimes change the way that news is received. A blog post about positive spin on Grammarly.com recommends presenting solutions instead of problems — to “state what you want, not what you don’t.” I believe the governor and his administration have followed similar advice in replacing the word “toll” with the word “choice.” Except in this case, they’re stating what they think Tennesseans want. The implication is that Tennesseans will have a “choice” regarding using traffic lanes — so that’s what they’re saying, rather than that we will have to pay a toll. 

McCall also points out that Gov. Lee and his administration use the word “choice” in other less-than-stellar ways. She notes that the term “school choice” “has become shorthand for ‘charter schools,’ a passion of Lee’s.” But “his idea of ‘choice schools’ may be the Hillsdale College-backed charter schools pushed by Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, who opined earlier this year that teachers ‘come from the [dumbest] parts of the [dumbest] colleges.’  ” McCall further fumed that when it comes to reproductive health care, the word “choice” in Tennessee does not apply since the implementation of Tennessee’s “trigger law,”  which took effect 30 days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal abortion protections laid out by Roe v. Wade.

When hearing the word “choice” from Tennessee lawmakers, perhaps we need to be skeptical. In most instances “choice” is a tremendous thing — but when the word is bandied about to make us feel better about negative information, it’s not so tremendous. I’m with McCall, who writes that she would “prefer lawmakers who would shoot straight about our options and lack of them.”

Because I believe that as Tennesseans, that’s the least we deserve. 

Bill Freeman

Bill Freeman is the owner of FW Publishing, the publishing company that produces the Nashville Scene, Nfocus, the Nashville Post, and Home Page Media Group in Williamson County.