Orphan Road

Jim Horn edition:

State Treasurer Mike Murphy has said both the 520 and I-90 bridges should be tolled in order to keep financing viable for a new 520 Bridge, but one transportation activist predicted a backlash if tolls are charged for both bridges and imposed before the new 520 Bridge is completed as some propose.

"I just think the public reaction to that is going to be very bad," said Jim Horn, former state senator and president of the Eastside Transportation Association, a pro-highway and bus group.

If the ETA is indeed a "pro-bus group," it should be thrilled about charging tolls on both bridges and before the new 520 span is completed. After all, tolls are the only plausible way to keep buses moving during rush hour. Especially on the existing 520, where there's no dedicated HOV lane.

But, of course, ETA just says it's "pro-bus" and we're supposed to take them at their word.

This quote from Sen. Jim Horn is priceless:

And any proposal would encounter stiff opposition from people like former state Sen. Jim Horn, R-Mercer Island, a longtime toll skeptic. He says regionwide tolling is really about "rationing your roadways and harming your quality of life."

Sen. Horn then announced his proposal to widen I-405 to infinity lanes in each direction.

Well, okay, it was last week, but still, this is too priceless:

Britain has been rationing things since 1945. In America, we don't ration things.

-- NY Assemblyman Michael Benjamin (D-Bronx), explaining why London's congestion pricing won't work in the U.S.

I'm pretty sure the U.S. also engaged in rationing during WWII, for what it's worth.

I didn't blog much about New York's remarkable congestion pricing plan ($8 to enter the city below 60th St.), but now that it's been killed by Democrats in NY's state assembly, it's worth reading this post-mortem on Grist.

Elsewhere, Knute Berger cautions Puget Sound lawmakers against following NYC down this particular rabbit hole. As I've said before, there's a continuum of possibilities between tolling specific bridges to raise revenue and using pricing as a way to manage demand and fund transit. Some are more politically feasable than others.

Remember that federal grant that Seattle received last summer to study tolling on 520? The Washington Post has a story on the program behind it, which is part of a larger effort on the part of the Bush Administration to privatize roads:

When Democrats took control of Congress and stripped most earmarks from last year's federal budget, Peters took $850 million that would have been shipped to hundreds of municipalities and poured it into Urban Partnerships, a pilot program awarded to five cities on the condition that they test congestion pricing.

The focus on toll roads alarmed the transit industry, which argues that public transportation is the best way to fight gridlock in cities. Industry leaders say the DOT has made it increasingly difficult for expensive rail projects to qualify for federal dollars. The number of major new rail and bus projects on track for federal funding dropped from 48 in 2001 to 17 in 2007, even as transit ridership hit a 50-year high last year and demand for new service is soaring.

William Millar, who heads the American Public Transportation Association, says he set up three appointments with Duvall to try to influence how the Urban Partnership money would be spent, but each was cancelled. "They just see no role for transit," Millar said.

I think congestion pricing of some sort is inevitable, and probably a good idea in the long run, but we have to keep in mind that once you've moved to a tax-supported infrastructure to a fee-supported infrastructure, the next logical step can be to privatize the whole darn thing. This is one reason why environmentalists oppose use fees for parks: once you've created a consistent revenue stream, sooner or later it makes sense to let the Mariott Corporation, say, come in to run Yellowstone and collect the fees.

In other words, we need to tread carefully here. That's not to say that tolls are impossible. After all, highways on the East Coast have been tolled for decades and have still stayed within public ownership. But beware the words "public-private parntership," which can often lead to a whole lot of public funds going to enrich private companies with little emphasis on what the public's getting in return. But don't take my word for it, listen to the GAO:

Public distrust of privatization, however, remains high. Republicans lost control of the Indiana state legislature in 2006 partly because of controversy over the governor's lease of a public highway to Macquarie. Political opposition has also forced governors in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to suspend plans to lease roads. Texas lawmakers put a two-year freeze on the governor's strategy to privatize a 4,000-mile network of tolled highways.

Last month, the Government Accountability Office warned that tolls on privatized roads are typically higher than if the roads remain under public control, because of the need to generate steady profits for private investors. The report said the federal government needs to better protect the public interest.

"This is all about making money," said Frank Busalacchi, the Wisconsin transportation secretary and a member of a congressionally chartered commission that last year studied transportation funding and supported raising the gas tax. "The financiers, bankers, people coming in -- the foreign dollars coming in and buying infrastructure in this country that American people put down."

Ben says congestion pricing is a political loser in the short run, and it's a fight that transit advocates "don't need." I basically agree, but I think we need to take a step back to define our terms and parse out some of the separate arguments.

Tolling and congestion pricing (and even "pay as you drive" insurance) are mechanisms being debated right now to either (a) provide a source of transportation revenue, (b) de-incentivize SOV driving, or (c) both. Here are a few ideas that have been mooted in this area:

1. Toll new bridges (e.g. the Tacoma Narrows) at a fixed rate to pay for the cost of building and maintaining the bridge
2. Install HOT lanes (e.g. SR 167) to manage demand and collect revenue
3. Toll new bridges/roads (e.g. SR 520) at a variable rate to pay for the cost and manage demand
4. Toll existing bridges/roads (e.g. SR 520) at a variable rate to manage demand and collect revenue for an eventual replacement
5. Install a transponder in every car and toll people for every mile they drive on all major highways in the region, to manage demand and collect revenue
6. Do any of #2 - #5 above, but also siphon off some of the money to pay for transit projects.

I've ordered these in the order of how politically controversial they seem. #1 and #2 are so uncontroversial, they're already happening! #3 is pretty likely and #4 is less likely, but gained at least tacit support in the legislature this year. It's #5 and #6 that really get people's goats. neither of those are particularly close at hand. #5 basically exists in just two places: London and Ron Sims' brain.

#6 gets to the heart of Ben's argument. This is where the controversy would arise. But this option is a long way off, especially some version of 5+6, which, Ben's right, would create a firestorm of protest. In Olympia this session, Democrats beat back GOP efforts to explicitly ban #6, but that just leaves it open as an option, it doesn't commit us to it. And judging by Mary Haugen's email inbox, it's quite a radioactive subject.

Finally, as the gas tax money dries up, there will be increasing pressure to use toll money to pay for roads. As a result, there will almost certainly be little left over to pay for transit (except maybe HOV lanes, bike lanes, and other road improvements that also benefit transit).

So, long story short, I think we've got a ways to go, and a lot of noncontroversial and semi-controversial options to consider in the meantime.

Willamette Week gets at some of the problems with the mileage tax, which many have suggested as an alternate method of financing roads and managing congestion. People participating in the program mostly seemed to like it, but big advocacy groups, from environmentalists to civil libertarians, are opposed. Installing a device in people's cars that tracks their movements will encounter a ton of political resistance.

According to a study in London, congestion pricing works for cars, but it also benefits public transit. As the roads clear up, bus service becomes more reliable, which makes it more desirable, which makes the roads clearer, etc., etc...

Good stuff. Major caveat, of course, is that London is a large city with both an extensive subway system and sky-high gas prices, neither of which apply in Seattle. So we can't expect the tipping point to be the same. Still, it's more encouraging data.

(Via)

CS Monitor has a sampling:

Coming soon to a bottleneck near you:

•"Queue-jumper" lanes such as one in Lee County, Fla., where harried drivers paying a 25-cent toll can get around backed-up intersections.

•Trucker toll lanes, already under consideration in Atlanta, that will in effect segregate big rigs from the rest of the freeway public.

•Privately managed zoom lanes, similar to the South Bay Expressway that opened in San Diego on Nov. 19, that allow motorists to move at a heavenly 65 miles per hour.

Austin Jenkins reports:

The bill as drafted says the Legislature would have sole authority to impose tolls, thus excluding local jurisdictions. Toll prices would be set by the Washington State Transportation Commission, an appointed body. The bill would allow tolls to continue to be collected after a project is paid off – a significant departure from current policy. Finally, the legislation permits toll prices to fluctuate between peak and off-peak travel times, which is called "variable pricing." Other key decisions will be whether tolling can be used to manage demand and whether money raised from tolls could be applied broadly — say, to underwrite transit.

That last part is key. Our current state gas taxes can only be used for highways. Getting drivers to pay for transit projects would be a big shift, but a needed one. For example, Cascadia Prospectus, in the process of unveiling the Discovery Institute's own plan, notes that the Port Authority of NY and NJ is going to increase the tolls on the Hudson River crossings to $8 at peak, in part to help finance a second commuter rail tunnel.

One can only imagine the kind of hysteria we'd see here in the Puget Sound, if, say, drivers crossing the 520 bridge had to pay a toll to help finance a light rail link. But that's the direction we need to be going in. Thusfar the only such efforts (that I can recall) to have drivers subsidize transit -- the Monorail and ST2 car-tab taxes -- have fallen apart. And the success of I-695, which gutted the car-tab fees that were used to fund transit projects, has no doubt made lawmakers leery of taxing drivers to fund transit.

For all Prop. 1's flaws, one upside was that it would have reinforced a holistic approach to transportation funding, and perhaps given credence to the idea that gas and car taxes could be used to fund transit projects. But maybe that's being too optimistic.