By: Glenn R. Pascall
Puget Sound Business Journal
August 1, 2008
Link to original op-ed
On July 23 the Washington Department of Transportation released a study that found most motorists using the State Route 520 bridge would keep driving it even with round-trip tolls as high as $6.85. If tolls are imposed on both the Interstate 90 and 520 crossings of Lake Washington in 2016 when a new 520 bridge opens, annual revenue is estimated at $2 billion.
There’s a widespread feeling among the motoring public that highway and bridge tolls are “out there” in the future of financing transportation. This generates a sense of unease. After all, who wants to pay tolls? Are the needs so inescapable and the alternatives so unworkable that tolls are inevitable?
Change is coming in the way we travel. The American Automobile Association says it would cost the average two-car family $6,200 a year to gas up at current prices. The U.S. Department of Transportation recently estimated that Americans drove about 30 billion fewer miles in the previous six months than during the same period a year ago. Transit ridership is up 3 percent over the year and 30 percent since 1995.
Tolls that support transit as well as general-purpose highways appear to be an increasingly attractive funding source. As Americans drive less so they can buy less gas, or shift to alternative fuels, tolls based on mileage and congestion are likely to supplant the dwindling gas tax. Tolls are not only stable but are the purest form of user tax, measuring the impact of each driver on the capacity of the system.
Tolls already are here in Washington state. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge charges $4 a car, and a high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane recently opened on State Route 167.
But can tolls and the gas tax work together? That was the rhetorical question posed by David Dye, chief operating officer for the Washington State Department of Transportation, who spoke at Cascadia Center’s recent Seattle workshop on Tolling and Traffic Management.
“Yes,” Dye said. “The Tacoma Narrows Bridge is funded by both - 70 percent tolls and 30 percent gas tax.”
To support tolls, the public needs to know that government is not wasting the revenue, said Art James, project director for Innovative Partnerships at the Oregon Department of Transportation, also speaking at the conference.
In fact, he noted, “The public prefers a toll to a general tax increase because they know where the money is going and are willing to pay for a direct benefit in reduction of trip times. The public (also) likes the convenience of electronic tolling.”
Apart from being a reliable revenue source, tolls have traffic management benefits. Variable, real-time tolls can deter unnecessary rush-hour trips. An intriguing test of public response to such tolling was undertaken by the Puget Sound Regional Council.
Participants in the “Traffic Choices” project were awarded a “nest egg” of funds based on the degree to which they adopted congestion-avoidance in their travel plans.
GPS devices were used to apply a toll rate with variable charges by time and location. The travel patterns of participating families were monitored over a six-month period to see if they would modify the number of trips, routes, travel times and destinations “in order to reap a net financial reward.”
“This was a way of looking at how people make their travel plan decisions across a broad range of alternatives,” said Matthew Kitchen, principal researcher and manager for this incentive-based experiment.
Drivers responded with a 12 percent reduction in vehicle miles traveled. “The value of travel time appears to be greater than is often assumed in studies of this kind,’’ Kitchen noted.
As the Puget Sound area takes the first steps toward highway pricing, a similar-sized metro area 1,200 miles to the south is far down the road in applying these concepts.
San Diego, using a mix of HOT lanes, transit service, and capacity management, is in the forefront of “value pricing” its transportation system, said Gary Gallegos, executive director of the San Diego Association of Governments.
An eight-mile section of Interstate 15, which bisects the city, is managed with a sophisticated real-time tolling system that can adjust prices every six minutes depending on traffic volume. Tolls range from as little as 50 cents to a maximum of $8 under the most congested conditions.
“Our intent is not to maximize revenues,” Gallegos said, “but to create the most equitable system that works for everyone.” Toll revenue is used partly to support bus rapid transit (BRT) service. “In this way, we marry the freeway system and the transit system. BRT allows drivers a competitive choice to the private auto,” Gallegos said.
Public support is high. Critics of so-called “Lexus lanes” became supporters when they saw that drivers willing to pay for time savings were funding improved bus service and dedicated lanes that could be used by transit.
The improvements being installed on I-15 cost $1.5 billion, Gallegos said.
“We’re taking a network approach, not building isolated segments,” he concluded. “Our ultimate goal is to automate highways for safety and throughput, to double or triple capacity” - a marriage of computer-based tolling and with smart roads and smart cars.
Resistance to change is strong but the potential results of a use-based rather than fuels-based system are highly beneficial - for the environment, for quality of life, and for the economy.
GLENN PASCALL’s column appears regularly in the Puget Sound Business Journal.
