tolling

Road Tolling May Be A Necessary Evil For Vancouver

This article, published by The Star, references the Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute: A few hours south of here, Matt Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center, is making a strong case for regional tolling for the Seattle metropolitan area. Rosenberg says cities like Seattle and Vancouver need to get serious about road tolling not only to Read More ›

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 ›

Congress Begins Grappling With New Surface Transportation Funding Bill

The current federal surface transportation funding bill expires this summer. A crucial revenue source is the federal gas tax trust fund, now chronically insolvent. The federal gas tax hasn’t been raised in 16 years, and it isn’t indexed to inflation. A highway system built in the 1950s and 1960s continues to wear down under heavy use, increasing funding needs for Read More ›

The Viaduct Decision’s Next Step: Tolling

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 ›

Toll-booth-free Tolling On SR 520 And I-90

The State Route 520 Tolling Implementation Committee’s “November Scenario Evaluation” document (pdf) released last week shows that the most robust regional financing for replacing the dangerously sub-par 520 bridge comes from time-variable tolling starting in 2010 and tolling the parallel I-90 span across Lake Washington, starting in 2010 or 2016. Tolling in this key east-west corridor would be done on Read More ›

White House Looks To Private Sector To Push Road Pricing

This article, published by Greenwire/E&E News, quotes Discovery Institute Fellow Bruce Agnew: “Now the [states] can’t even keep up with operation and maintenance; they are being forced increasingly to the private market,” said Bruce Agnew, policy director at the Cascadia Project, a Seattle-based transportation think tank. The rest of the article can be found here.