Tolls are spreading and offer cities that don’t levy them an opportunity

In the Northeast, you can hardly turn a wheel of your car without confronting a toll booth for a bridge, tunnel or stretch of highway.

The West Coast hasn’t been nearly as toll happy, at least when it comes to highways, but certainly bridges have been fair game for tolls. The original Tacoma Narrows Bridge (Galloping Gertie) charged a toll for crossing, as did its successor. Floating bridges came with tolls. In fact, the state even had a Toll Bridge Authority, dissolved in 1977, to fund such projects.

In between the two coasts is a huge swath of America in which motorists have never had to stop to yank a thin-cardboard ticket out of a dispensing machine at an on-ramp or chuck some coins at a basket.

For them, the American freeway has been just that — free (overlooking the gas taxes that finance road construction and repair).

The interstate highway, one of the underappreciated contributors to this country’s economic growth in the second half of the last century, was predicated upon being free to cars and truck (although some turnpikes and toll roads that predated the interstate highway were grandfathered in.)

There was even a time, especially in the Northwest, when the trend was toward removing tolls, such as for bridges once the bonds to finance them were paid off.

Not only has that trend reversed, it’s also picking up momentum in the direction of putting more tolls on more stretches of pavement. And that has some interesting economic implications for the region.

Savvy drivers who wanted to get to destinations in Seattle, or to get through the city while avoiding notorious Interstate 5 choke points, have long favored the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which happens to be a free route. No more, once the viaduct comes down and traffic is diverted to a tunnel, for which toll rates haven’t been set yet.

Tolls have been imposed on the eastbound Tacoma Narrows bridge, and re-established on the 520 floating bridge. Interstate 405 and the Valley Freeway have sections in which lanes are reserved for those willing to pay for the privilege of driving on them.

And now, coming from our neighboring state to the south, is a plan to put tolls on interstate highways for all users.

Oregon’s legislature told the state transportation commission “to develop a proposal for congestion pricing on I-5 and I-205 from the state line to the junction of the two freeways just south of Tualatin, to reduce congestion.” A policy advisory committee this month delivered recommendations that include pilot projects that would convert all lanes of I-5 through Portland to a toll road.

The idea behind congestion pricing is to make it financially painful to use the highways, especially at peak rush hours. (A system in which tolls are adjusted up and down, depending on anticipated demand is sometimes referred to as dynamic pricing.) “You want to drive through the heart of our city at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday? What’s it worth to you?”

There is a certain theoretical logic to value pricing of highway usage. By encouraging drivers to shift trips to other parts of the day, use other forms of transportation or avoid the trip entirely, some of the congestion might be relieved.

But an undiscovered law of Newtonian physics states that for every action there is an equal and opposite unintended consequence.

Seattle’s new mayor has proposed congestion pricing there. Combine that with the cost and hassle of finding parking once you get to the city, and the natural reaction is to say, “Ah, the heck with it” and stay home.

That’s the whole idea, but not everyone — think of retailers, entertainment venues and restaurants — might be so enamored with the idea of encouraging people to stay away. Perhaps Seattle figures it can get away with it because of all the people with money sloshing around in town, but there’s opportunity for lots of businesses to keep customers and their dollars local.

That brings us to another interested party — businesses that need to ship and receive. Those businesses could be as big as the port, or as small as a florist’s shop, but tolls won’t be cheap individually and they can add up quickly.

Often businesses don’t have the flexibility to schedule shipments in off-peak hours or to avoid going to certain areas entirely. Even those digital-goods companies in Seattle every now and then need a delivery of physical items — like food — and those deliveries aren’t going to be done by light rail or bike messenger, or even drones.

There again is opportunity for communities and businesses to leverage tolling in other locales to their advantage, provided they can avoid tolls on their own routes in, out and around.

That might be tough. The Oregon policy committee’s report notes, “there is considerable interest regionally in conducting a more comprehensive evaluation of how congestion pricing can manage congestion on all the Portland metro area highways, in addition to I-5 and I-205.”

When they install a toll booth at the end of your street, or a Good to Go transponder where your driveway meets the street, don’t say you didn’t see this coming.

This story was originally published July 19, 2018 at 9:00 AM.