electronic tolling

Matt Rosenberg
September 22, 2009
Cascadia

Time To Go “All In” On Tolls

Matt Rosenberg
September 22, 2009
Cascadia
Just putting tolls on the Evergreen Point Bridge is not going to cut it. Instead, the region needs to apply tolls all along the 520 corridor and broadly across our highway system. Here's an encouraging progress report. The four-lane Evergreen Point Floating Bridge across Lake Washington on State Route 520 is a relic of a bygone era, congested and disaster prone. How urgent is the need for a planned six-lane replacement? The Washington State Department of Transportation has gone so far as to graphically model on YouTube how the bridge might buckle under duress, threatening lives and paralyzing the region's highway network. And is the region stepping up to the challenge? Less than half the funding is secured. The Seattle-side configuration is still being debated. More broadly, the project begs a more comprehensive regional tolling strategy because our bridges and highways are all connected. We can't keep doing transportation mega-projects on a disjointed, one-off basis. A key to any solution is tolling, and soon. Here and nationwide, 40 years of sizzling growth in vehicle miles traveled has left too many sections of highways, arterial roads, and bridges overburdened, in disrepair, and obsolete in the face of seismic and other hazards. Those ballyhooed federal stimulus funds were a mere drop in the bucket, amounting to less than one-quarter of what a landmark Congressional commission report says is needed annually. The per-gallon gas tax is badly failing at the federal and state levels. The federal gas tax trust fund is bankrupt, and living on bailouts. Even tripling state gas tax contributions to pending mega-projects in Washington state would do little to close wide funding gaps, state data show. A big new federal transportation bill — which may well include the first hike in the U.S. gas tax since 1993 — will help some, but not that much. (More) Read More ›
Aubrey Cohen
June 1, 2009
Cascadia

Will More Washington Roads Take Their Toll On Drivers

Aubrey Cohen
June 1, 2009
Cascadia

This article, published by Seattle PI, quotes Matt Rosenberg of Discovery Institute: Matt Rosenberg, a senior fellow at Cascadia Center of the Discovery Institute, recently called for managing peak-hour congestion in the central Puget Sound area “by bravely establishing – and soon – a seamless regional system of variably-priced, automated, and ultimately corridor-length tolling on highways and major state routes.” The rest of the Read More ›

Matt Rosenberg
January 19, 2009
Cascadia

The Viaduct Decision’s Next Step: Tolling

Matt Rosenberg
January 19, 2009
Cascadia

In an interview with Ross Reynolds on KUOW-FM – MP3 audio file here – Washington Governor Chris Gregoire said it was “very likely” that tolling would be applied to the new deep bored tunnel planned to replace the seismically vulnerable Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99 in Seattle. (A state rendering of the bored tunnel’s cross-section is below, right.) Read More ›