Tolls Planned for All Puget Sound Major Roadways

What's the first thing you ask when you read this Daily Journal of Commerce story lead-in: "The Puget Sound Regional Council is expected to approve a far-reaching plan this afternoon that could lead to tolling of all major roads in the metropolitan area by 2030"?

That's right, what's the Puget Sound Regional Council? It's a consortium of central Puget Sound counties (King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap), cities and towns, ports, tribes, transit agencies, and the state that plans for regional transportation, land use and economic development. Its current president is Everett mayor Ray Stephanson; vice-president, Kitsap Co. commissioner Josh Brown; and executive director, Bob Drewel.

Last year the PSRC overwhelmingly approved its Transportation 2040 document, which lays out how the area's leadership envisions meeting future demand due to growth in population, jobs, and housing.

The PSRC forecasts population growth of 42 percent over the next 30 years, to 5 million, and concomitant increases in jobs (60 percent) and housing (56 percent).

There's a graph that looks very much like the forecasters placed a ruler on the trendlines from 1960 to the mid-2000s and kept running the pencil out until they reached 2040. There, that's predictive science!

Seattleites may be interested to know that Mayor McGinn was among the three percent voting against the 2040 plan. The DJC says his office told them, "Instead of moving our region forward in improving transit, density, equal access to infrastructure and greenhouse gas reductions, the plan will preserve the status quo with only relatively modest investments in transit and biking, coupled with massive expansions of new highways."

After reading it, I have to agree with McGinn. The PSRC plan for the next 30 years is to keep building roads, and, via tolling and miles-traveled fees, charge everyone more for using them. Their overall goal is to somehow absorb the significant growth they predict while maintaining current levels of congestion. Essentially, people are being forced to fund megaprojects, and then pay more if they want to drive on them. (The downtown tunnel toll is expected to cost between $3.50 and $5 each way.) It's the Gotcha Capitalism version of transportation policy.

As is often the case with documents like these, the PSRC offers you five different alternatives (including the classic "Do nothing," along with an assortment of other strictly non-innovative proposals) before notifying you of the one they've decided on, cunningly named the "Preferred Alternative." That includes:

• more transit service than all other alternatives

• more miles of biking and walking facilities focused on access to transit stations and centers and completing regional trail links than all other alternatives

• current levels of vehicle ferry service, and additional passenger ferries

• replacement of several vulnerable roadways including the Alaskan Way Viaduct and SR 520 Floating Bridge

• completion of missing links in the highway network such as SR 509, SR 167, and the Cross Base Highway

• expansion of local arterials and state highways in limited but strategic ways to service growth in urban growth centers

The Preferred Alternative (PA, henceforth) would build about 950 miles of new roads, and 553 miles of bike trails, and I'll let you guess which of those projects is astoundingly more expensive than the other. Of all the alternatives, the PA adds the second highest amount of lane miles, an increase of seven percent, or 13,764 miles, including arterials. ("[N]one of the plan alternatives include specific investments in new intercity passenger rail.")

There's also the sticky question (this is an environmental impact statement, after all) of meeting the state's greenhouse gas emission goals, since the state has committed to reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

To give you a sense of how goal-driven the alternatives are, the PSRC admits that "no alternative would reduce emissions below 2006 levels, which is the PSRC modeled base year." In fact, they go on to say that they can't say "with certainty" that adopting the PA would fulfill the state's emission reduction goals. They seem mainly to be crossing their fingers and hoping for technological advances, while building thousands of lane-miles of new roads.

I don't want to leave you with the impression that it's all bad news. The plan does call for more passenger ferries.