Orphan Road

Seattle City Council wants tolls on 520 and 90, starting in 2010. This is even more aggressive than the fastest schedule that the tolling committee is considering:

Council President Richard Conlin, who also heads the council's SR 520 Committee, presented a letter to the committee, saying council members hope tolls will help "improve mobility throughout the region." The fare, around $2.30 one-way, depending on the time of travel, is "relatively modest yet still raises adequate revenue," he said.

By signaling that he wants the tolling to help manage congestion even before a new bridge is built, this proposal would rate a solid 4 out of 6 on my home-grown congestion pricing controversy-meter. Bold, but not politically impossible.

A major sticking point is what to do about Mercer Island. Island residents might suddenly have to pay a toll to go just about anywhere if there's a toll on I-90. On the one hand, that seems fair, certainly residents of Puget Sound's other islands (Vashon, Orcas, etc.) pay tolls to get on or off the Island. On the other hand, it's not something that most residents had in mind when they first moved there.

Regardless, there are a ton of ways to mitigate this, and I'm sure they will all get discussed at the next tolling open house which is, as luck would have it, on Mercer Island. You could set up the toll transponders on the other side of the island, so that Mercer Islanders could ride free to and from Bellevue, for example, but would have to pay to get into Seattle. Then they'd be in the same boat as the rest of the Eastside ('cept for the 206 area code, natch!).

The more interesting problem is how you handle people who don't have transponders in their cars. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge has a single toll booth for people to pay cash. The 520 committee, on the other hand, is touting a "no toll booths" strategy, according to their site:

However, we know that some vehicles will not have transponders or may be visiting from out of town. These vehicles will have their license plate photographed and can prepay or be invoiced for the toll, which will include an additional surcharge for processing the video.

This seems like it's going to piss a lot of people off, especially the additional surcharge bit. And I see no way they can get 4 toll booths and the requisite right-of-ways built between now and 2010.

WSDOT's Flickr page has lots of great photos of the snow-clearing efforts going on up at snoqualmie pass.

(via Seattlest, photo by WSDOT used under a Creative Commons license)

Variable pricing, up to $7 at peak, and also tolls on I-90. Great, I'm all for that. Starting in 2009? Genius.

About the lack of light rail, Ben at STB makes a good point that by the time Sound Transit ever got around to putting trains on 520, even a new bridge will be halfway to the end of it's natural life. So it's not as big a deal as I'd made it out to be yesterday. Greg Nickels agrees.

Study of the I-90 center roadway.

What can I say, I suppose it's "HOV Lane Friday" here at Orphan Road.

Driving back from Bellevue this morning, I noticed work had begun on adding HOV lanes on and around Mercer Island:

I-90 has a two-lane reversible center roadway between Seattle and Bellevue for buses, carpools and vanpools only. Traffic travels westbound in the mornings and eastbound in the evenings on the center roadway. However, buses, carpools and vanpools that are traveling in the opposite direction of the center roadway are forced to use general-purpose lanes. This makes buses and other high occupancy vehicles traveling between Seattle and Bellevue run increasingly late during rush hours, and reduces the benefits of sharing the ride.

The reversible center lane, used on I-90 and I-5 north of Seattle, naturally only works when the bulk of traffic is going one way in the morning and the other way in the afternoon. That may have been the case years ago, when the I-90 lane was first envisioned (and it's still mostly the case on I-5), but it's not the case any more on the Eastside. In fact, there may even be more people traveling East in the morning. Q.E.D., the buses suck.

Fortunately, when light rail is built across I-90, they'll do away with the reversible center lane entirely, use it for the trains instead, and put standard HOV lanes in either direction. I suspect the work on Mercer Island is a precursor to that effort.