Toll on, Columbia!
Soon we'll all be like salmon, with our way home blocked – by a tollbooth.
Just as the Bush administration has dangled a $138 million carrot of federal funds for Seattle area transportation projects if Washington starts tolling in the Highway 520 corridor, the feds have now moved another Northwest project to the front burner – one that will undoubtedly involve road tolling. The Oregonian reports:
U.S. officials have named the Interstate 5 bridge over the Columbia River one of the nation's top transportation priorities, promising to clear the federal bureaucracy to help a $2 billion to $6 billion reconstruction move forward at full speed.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has promised to help find money and furnish permits for the I-5 bridge – it connects Portland with Vancouver – immediately pledging $15 million in planning money.
The bridge project was part of a West Coast-wide plea for congestion relief. Oregon, Washington and California had joined to ask the federal government to make Interstate 5 a national priority. Thirty-eight traffic-clotted regions nationally competed to be named Corridors of the Future, and Interstate 5 through Oregon, Washington and California was one of six that made it, the Transportation Department announced late Monday.One reason the massive, car-centric Washington-Oregon project jumped to the head of the class is the willingness of local officials to consider congestion pricing schemes, which is the string-de-jour for federal assistance:
Ian Grossman, a spokesman for the Federal Highway Administration, said the potential use of tolls, and the possibility of variable charges, helped make the Columbia River Crossing stand out.
Federal officials were especially interested that Oregon and Washington are willing to consider congestion pricing – the practice of tolling a roadway and imposing higher tolls during peak traffic hours, the higher prices intended to dissuade use at certain times of day.
"It's the innovative financing that we believe will have a real impact on relieving congestion," Grossman said.According to The Oregonian, most Northwest congressional members pleaded for the designation from the feds, with one rather notable exception from Oregon:
U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, an influential transportation policymaker as chairman of the House subcommittee on highways and transit, was the only member of the Oregon delegation who did not sign on. DeFazio, an outspoken critic of the Bush administrations encouragement of highway tolls, was not available for comment Tuesday.That's quite an exception, given DeFazio's committee chairmanship. DeFazio is also an outspoken critic of toll road privatization, another trend pushed by current and former Bush administration officials. The federal funds offered aren't enough to actually implement congestion pricing programs. Indeed, a fine-print analysis of a $354 million grant awarded New York City this summer, at the same time as the Seattle grant, reveals that only a tiny portion (about $10 million) is earmarked for that purpose, hardly enough to get started on the surveillance-heavy, London-style congestion pricing system that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has envisioned. However, the terms of the grant could be met by adding high tolls to the city's free East River bridges, according to Kenneth Orski who publishes Innovation Briefs, a pro-tolling transportation newsletter. The federal funding strategy, as in the Columbia River case, appears to be less about instituting full-fledged congestion pricing than in establishing it as a precedent for the future. As federal tax dollars for transportation become more scarce, the feds want to find ways of hitting local taxpayers harder without raising taxes. Pay-as-you go driving is one way to do this. This user-fee approach to funding transportation represents an enormous sea-change in how transportation is funded in this country. It is especially significant in the West, where the right to a freewheeling lifestyle has been taken for granted. Instead of being implemented wholesale, however, it will be done incrementally, with a toll here and a toll there, from the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge to the Evergreen Point Bridge across Lake Washington to the Columbia crossing. Pretty soon we'll all be like the salmon, finding our way home blocked, not by dams but by toll booths. I'm sure Woody Guthrie could have made a song out of that.
Topics:
520 Bridge,
Federal,
Mossback,
Oregon,
Portland,
Seattle,
U.S. Congress,
Washington,
Politics,
Transportation
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Comments:
Posted Fri, Sep 14, 8:43 a.m. Inappropriate
Tolls are a great idea because users pay for the infrastructure they cause to be needed (well, cause to be built). Congestion pricing has the added benefit of reducing the peaks in demand and therefore reducing the size of road that's justified.
I like gas taxes because users pay regardless of where they're going, and they're also encouraged to drive fuel-efficient vehicles. But gas taxes don't have the added upside of encouraging demand to move to non-peak times.
Of course, the Columbia solution should involve substantially-improved transit, and they shouldn't expand road capacity by much.
Posted Fri, Sep 14, 4:11 p.m. Inappropriate
In the same vein, transit fares ought to be increased to help pay more of the cost of maintaining and expanding transit.
Mossback's observation about the nature of our western fascination with unfettered driving along the freeway (gone 95 mph through Montana of late?) works for rural areas and wide open spaces (refer to his last essay for his thoughts on that subject), but does it any longer for urban areas?
It's kind of like the difference between the open range preferred by cattle barons of the old west versus fenced areas loathed by them yet favored by farmers who were more numerous and settled in nature.
User fees are good, and not just as tolls on roads. Higher fees for government services of all kinds shift the cost from the general public to those who most directly benefit from them. It wouldn't take much of an increase in most user fees to make a significant difference to the public at large.
Toll roads have been around since the beginning of the Republic. They've been here, too (520 when originally built, and now the new Narrows Bridge), so using them on I-5 across the Columbia shouldn't be regarded as that big of a deal. Frankly, we'd better get used to tolls because they're probably the wave of the future and the price we'll pay for federal highway help.
My concern is more the RFID technology that will be used to electronically charge us, but that's a subject of past and, hopefully, future discussions.
The Piper
Posted Fri, Sep 14, 4:58 p.m. Inappropriate
Further, quality public transit fulfills a social obligation to allow people to get around even if they don't have much money. And transit allows our city to remain affordable to people with lesser incomes by allowing them to spend very little on transportation even while spending too much on housing.
So no, I don't agree that transit fares ought to go higher.
Posted Fri, Sep 14, 5:44 p.m. Inappropriate
RE: Cattle versus farms...: Too bad that the current transit system cannot meet it's current fairbox recovery goals (25%). How are things over at North Star, Matt?
Posted Fri, Sep 14, 10:22 p.m. Inappropriate
1. It used to be that the Feds paid 80% or so of freeway costs. Now, it's more or less reversed. This is just my sense of what I've been reading lately, I haven't done the research to prove it. An example is the recent money coming to 520 which was only a pittance of the the total cost.
2. Current technology requires toll booths and a fairly primitive EZ-Pay system. Ultimately, it will be easy to bill cars wirelessly as they go by, as well as to take reasonable security safeguards. We don't really need to have toll booths for centuries. Technology will assure that we each get a proper bill for our infrastructure usage at the end of the month. Simple.
3. Putting more of a burden on drivers is only fair when it comes to the mode wars between cars and light rail. While I remain an enormous skeptic about the bloated cost of light rail, it's also quite true that road costs are very high, and that subsidizing all roads just encourages our existing patterns of consumption, without providing the proper incentives and disincentives that would make traffic flow more smoothly (with congestion priciing) and that would help put cost pressure on people to use and pay for public transit of any kind.
4. Tolls break the log jam on building infrastructure. Going for a vote of the people on massive tax packages is a grotesquely cumbersome way to manage a transportation system. And it leads to huge bonding costs that last for years. Sound Transit now wants to go out 50 years in their bonding and taxation. Most of the money spent will not go to building light rail but to debt service paying rich people who buy tax-exempt bonds. If light rail charged enough at the farebox and had enough customers, it might be able someday to generate significant funds to defray maintenance and operatiions costs, and to help pay for the capital investment. Sadly, there's not much revenue in light rail schemes, i.e., they don't do very well paying for themselves.
5. With tolling of existing bridges and freeways, we can raise money directly and accumulate dollars over years and decades to create dedicated funds for maintanance, operations, and replacement. That's the obvious way to have a self-sustaining system of infrastructure that can keep up with demand and growth.
The top-down political control of transportation through the various political entities we've created to make the system grotesquely inefficient is doomed. The center cannot hold. Look at the claims of the anti-Roads & Transportation taxes folks. They outline a maximum worst-case taxation of $157 billion over 50 years to do RAT. That gives you an idea of how out-of -control spending is on transportation, and why people are going to be forced to say No, even when they want to vote for a big omnibus package. It's kind of like saying I want to buy a Prius, but at $140,000, the car's just a bit too pricey.
In a nut-shell, then, tolls are good because:
1. The Feds aren't coughing up the money like they used to,
2. Someday you won't even have to use a toll booth,
3. Tolls help properly allocate transportation goods through pricing,
4. Tolling is the right way to avoid having to pass huge transportation tax packages every year, and finally,
5. Tolling is the more direct and efficient way to pay for ongoing funding of transportation.
Posted Sun, Sep 16, 10:58 a.m. Inappropriate
Bring Gas Taxes Home: Spending gas taxes in the county in which collected would also help address the most pressing transportation problems. It would have the side benefit of bringing some of the most incorrigible from east of the mountains to heel.
Posted Sun, Sep 16, 2:36 p.m. Inappropriate
Toll on, Columbia!: I'm sure as hell not going to pay a toll on a Federal Highway going from Oregon to Seattle just so some asshole from Vancouver can commute to Portland.
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