Tolls: Get used to the concept.
Narrows commuters have been complaining for years that they’ve been unfairly singled out to finance the new Narrows bridge with tolls. Many have been demanding that the planned new Highway 520 bridge over Lake Washington also be tolled.
They can relax. Highway 520 tolls are on their way. Maybe a lot sooner than anyone expected.
Gov. Chris Gregoire on Thursday announced a new plan for financing a replacement for the existing floating bridge, which is eroding and cracking – and could be sunk by a windstorm or earthquake.
It’s a $4 billion project, roughly, and $2 billion of that is unfunded. The Roads & Transit package on the November ballot would have picked up $1.1 billion of the shortfall, with tolls being a likely source for the rest.
Gregoire now proposes that tolls finance the entire $2 billion shortfall. More radically, she (and the state Department of Transportation) favor imposing the tolls next year, long before the new floating bridge would be completed.
Paying for a new project by charging tolls on an existing, untolled roadway would be unprecedented in this state. On the Narrows, at least, tolls were collected only after the new bridge opened.
Gregoire is raising an even more radical possibility: Tolls on the Interstate 90 bridge across Lake Washington, also to pay for the Highway 520 project.
The argument is that tolls on the 520 bridge will wind up far too high if they are imposed only there and only after the new bridge opens in 2018. And I-90 could be jammed if it becomes an escape route from the 520 tolls.
Plus, the federal government has given the state a $139 million grant to create toll infrastructure on the 520 bridge – the money goes away next year if it isn’t used.
Tolls were coming to Highway 520 in any event. The surprise here is how extensive the tolling across Lake Washington might be.
Welcome to the new era of transportation funding in Washington. There are only so many ways to fund necessary highway improvements. Most are indirect: gas taxes, federal grants, etc. Tolls have the virtues of an up-front user fee. You use the roads, you pay as you go.
They’re making a comeback now that electronic technology doesn’t require motorists to stop to pay them. The voters’ reluctance to finance projects with indirect taxes – through measures like Roads & Transit – could leave tolls as the main option left on the table.
A few years hence, Narrows commuters may be regarded as pioneers.
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