I-90

Ask Not for Whom The Road Tolls

This article, published by the Puget Sound Business Journal, refers to an article by Cascadia Fellow Matt Rosenberg: The Cascadia Center just posted a valuable piece about funding a replacement for the ailing State Route 520 Bridge between Seattle and the Eastside. The piece by Cascadia Fellow Matt Rosenberg highlights the $2.38 billion funding gap, and discusses the various plans to close the Read More ›

Time To Go “All In” On Tolls

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 ›

Light Rail Cut From The Plan For 520 Bridge

This article, published by Seattle PI, mentions Discovery Institute Fellow Bruce Agnew: This could provide an interim approach to light rail and provide a better picture of transit demand, plus help pay for transit improvements on both trans-lake corridors, said Bruce Agnew, director of the Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center for Regional Development, a Seattle think tank. The rest of the Read More ›

Sticker Shock? Get Over It

That collective shudder across Puget Sound this month had nothing to do with terrorism or tectonics. It was big-league sticker shock. Mired in traffic, our region learned from state transportation planners that expanding the 405, 167, 520 and 509 corridors and undergrounding the Alaskan Way Viaduct could cost taxpayers as much as $30 billion. That’s $30 billion with a “B,” Read More ›