This is not my idea but rather, somebody wrote it in a letter-to-the-editor published in The Oregonian 2-15-09.

Start collecting tolls now for the new 12-lane Interstate Bridge replacement.

This is a brilliant idea. If people want an expensive 12 lane bridge, they should be willing to pay for it -- STARTING NOW! Set up tolls on the Interstate Bridge and the Glenn Jackson Bridge and start collecting for it.

If people aren't willing to do this, then it is clear that we shouldn't go with anything larger than 8 lanes.

What say you?

Not a new idea; it was proposed last year when the new bridge was being discussed. The suggestion that I heard then was that if tolls were going to be needed with the new bridge to discourage drivers, why not put up the tolls now to discourage drivers now? They have a good point, one I never heard completely refuted.

Personally I hate tolls. Having grown up on the east coast with turnpikes (yuck!), I've always loved the freedom to drive without them on the west coast. I don't know why they are supposed required to fund the bridge. So it costs a little more - big deal. $5Billion vs. $4Billion? Compared to all the other money we are spending, doesn't sound like much.

Compared to all the other money we are spending, doesn't sound like much.

Any of that going to the Interstate bridge project?


One thing that could be done to discourage drivers is to require a visible pass ($50/mo?) to use the Interstate bridge during rush hours. Trucks and non-OR/WA plates not restricted. Perhaps this has been suggested also.

I used to oppose tolls, but I've come to support them.

Tolls, bah!

All one has to do is drive the toll-ways of Chicago, to see how "well" they work. Worst conditioned-roads I have EVER driven on. I always counted my blessings when I would cross into Wisconsin, where the roads are in great shape, and NO TOLLS!

First we already pay taxes. So we don't need tolls. But if they put one in. Make it where 100 csnts on the dollar has to go to the bridge project. And when it is paid for. The toll goes away. Period.

X 10,000 on what Brian said about the Chicago highways (maybe they should be called slowways!)

Not only are the roads poorly maintained and tolls virtually stop traffic during rush hour, although the I-Pass does help considerably, but once you get on the highway, in some instances you cant get back off for 10 or 15 miles!

I very often take I-205 from SR 500 south to Mill Plain. Wouldn't happen in Chicago. The first opportunity to exit would most likely be the airport!

I lived in the Chicago suburbs from 1990 to 1995. Hated the highway system. It wasn't the tolls as much as the inconvience.

On another not, I was reading an article the other day about some of the proposed new solutions.

Did you know that even with the 12 lane solution that there will still only be 3, that's right 3 thru lanes in each direction?

They are going to spend all that money and it won't do squat to help traffic congestion.

There needs to be at least 5 thru lanes in each direction. Even if they don't open all 5 right now, they need to be built in for future growth.

If they don't, the bridge will be at capacity the day it opens.

Traffic engineers have got to be the dumbest group of people on the planet. Just drive around in Vancouver for a while and you'll agree!

Stevethedj: First we already pay taxes. So we don't need tolls. But if they put one in. Make it where 100 csnts on the dollar has to go to the bridge project. And when it is paid for. The toll goes away. Period.

The tolls were removed eventually from the Interstate Bridge after it was first built. But today they are looking at the tolls not just to fund the continued maintenance of the bridge (sorry, the costs don't go away after construction ends) but to discourage too many drivers. I am not saying I agree with this, only that that's the thinking. I could support a rush-only toll of some sort that doesn't involve actual toll booths that would hold up traffic - maybe a camera that snaps your license plate or something. Since it does seem the I-5 bridge is largely used at rush hour by Washingtonians who work in Oregon, maybe they should pay a little more for its maintenance.

Bill, if you make the bridge 5 lanes in each direction, then you've got to widen I-5 to 5 lanes too - something that would cost a tremendous amount of money especially in Portland. And that's not what Oregon wants anyway; they don't want to encourage more drivers on the freeways, because that brings more traffic onto the other streets in Portland. And that's what they are trying to limit. It's going to increase anyway as population increases. They don't want it to get even worse.

Traffic engineers aren't all bad. They did a fantastic job with the Sunset Highway (26) in Portland. Traffic is much improved vs. five years ago going west from Portland. I used to hit backups at 217 consistently every morning going west; now there is never a backup. It's really a dramatic improvement, though it did take a long time to get that work done.

And don't blame traffic engineers for your roads. They are paid to solve problems given constraints like limited funding and sometimes conflicting project goals imposed by politicians. I'll bet most traffic engineers would choose different solutions if they had unlimited funding and the ability to choose their own priorities.

They need to build it as 5 lanes for future growth. Maybe they only open 3 lanes now and down the road (pun intended) they can open the other lanes as needed.

Since it does seem the I-5 bridge is largely used at rush hour by Washingtonians who work in Oregon, maybe they should pay a little more for its maintenance.

They already do. It's called Oregon State Income Tax.

Other than the privilege of working in Oregon, they derive no benefit from paying the tax. Also, they don't put much if any burden on the Portland infrastructure (Police, Fire, Medical) so it's almost pure profit for Oregon.

And don't blame traffic engineers for your roads.

It's not the roads per se that are a problem over here.

It is the traffic lights that they install in STUPID places that do nothing but impede the flow of traffic. If they are trying to win the "We Royally Screwed up Traffic the Best" award, I vote for them!
If you look at some of the things they do, I’m absolutely sure they have a person or ten dedicated to finding things that will make it difficult for drivers. And if reference to my statement above about the traffic lights, I’m also pretty sure that someone in the traffic department has a friend or family member working at Mill Plain Electric or at least it seems that way for all the dumb lights they put in.

The ONLY kudos I’ll give them is that on the new part of Mill Plain, between 164th and 192nd they have the left turn arrow flash yellow so you can go rather than wait for a green arrow. If they would change ALL the lights to be like that it would be a huge improvement.

I do know one thing for sure; the word "Synchronize" is not in existence in their vocabulary!!

Just a side note to all this. L.A. has 12 lane highways and one of the most congested traffic grids in the nation (last I heard Atlanta was the worst.). Adding more lanes is not the solution.

IMHO, more public transportation with tax incentives for leaving your car at home could prove to be an affective way of relieving pressure on a highway system.

The anti-car people are nuts. They want people to drive less, yet what they don't understand is that if they want an economy to grow, people must be able to move from point A to point B. Discouraging people from driving is the best way I know of to kill the local economy.

The I5 bridge should be 12 lanes minimum. We must look forward to the future of the region. People will always drive. The Utopian idea of public transportation serving everyone is a myth. Whether we use gas powered or cow poop powered vehicles to get from point A to point B, we will still need roads and bridges.

As for tolling, forget it. The bridge should be paid for by an increase in the gas tax and registration fees for vehicles. The entire region benefits because allowing goods and services to flow efficiently through that corridor is in all of our best interests.

It's a shame that a lot of the politicians that are in control have such ridiculous beliefs when it comes to managing traffic. Adding more lanes IS the solution unless we expect our population to shrink or want our economy to suffer.

IMO, "toll now, build later" actually means "toll now, build never (except for MAX tracks)." TriMet will probably demand to run the service, require payment for the alignment from Hayden Island to Clark College equal to C-TRANs total budget, and voila... Clark County left with no transit system and no voice in transit matters (like TriMet would ever have a Clark County representative on its board).

Changing a "toll" to a "gas tax" isn't any solution. An increase in gas taxes is probably more hated than tolls.

I cannot see how tolling cannot be an option. Both states are bleeding red. In 2007, Sam Adams considered asking taxpayers for half a billion dollars over ten years from taxpayers for road projects in Portland alone but it didn’t go anywhere. In Washington, King County and the City of Seattle have nearly ten billion dollars in road projects in the pipeline (one of which will be using tolls). Tolls have to be considered.

The days of old funding formulas are over. It's not like the old days when Hatfield and Packwood in Oregon or Magnuson and Jackson in Washington would bring back the bacon and more.

To build a bridge that has no more lanes than now is stupid. No point in spending money we don't have or won't have to put the same thing in that provides nothing more than we now have, just to have it look nicer.

Traffic planners obviously don't drive or they would realize the lousy setup they provide. Metered on ramps the way they do them here creates congestion on side roads and some freeways and adds to pollution. The way they set up signals borders on stupid. Some intersections have only one direction turn left at the start and then the other direction at the end. There is no traffic coming the opposite way but they don't let you turn left because you have to wait your part of the cycle. The planning here is to inconvenience you rather than to improve the flow of traffic. How many times have you waited to turn left when there is no opposing traffic? And for how long? If there is no traffic one direction but still lots in your direction, they should let you turn left rather than let the turn lane build up more. Some (82nd and Harmony/Sunnyside) that will have maybe two lanes of more than six cars each but the light is green only enough for maybe 3 to get through it and then stay green on 82nd when no cars are near the intersection.

How about off ramps from 181st exit on I-84? No cars moving on 181 for 30-45 seconds but you can't turn left because it stays red getting off the freeway. Then a few cars go by extending it for another minute. STupid. Frontage road in Troutdale at Marine Drive. Most of the night traffic is on Frontage road to I-84 west. However, the preference it for Marine Drive which has no traffic except for an occasional car. If you stop at the red light on Frontage, it will change just long enough for the one or two cars at the light to go through then it changes back immmediately to Marine Dr., even if there are no cars there but there may be 5 or so cars approaching on Frontage but it stays red until they stop. Grrrrr.
I could go on and on. Traffic moves freely in the morning on US26 at 217. Then they turn the metered on ramp on which forces those exiting 217 to 26 East bound to stop and it builds up a line on 217.

I agree about Chicago and Illinois traffic. They say the tolls are to maintain the roads. You need to keep digging out change (dollars now) for the booth and the roads are bumpy and not too good. As soon as you get to Wisconsin, it improves. They don't have tolls (on 90). I will say that I like the way they do their metered ramps better than here. The ones I have been at there stay green unless they want you to stop. Here, they keep them red until they want you to go. Their system is better for flow.

Beaverton traffic Planner is an oxymoron. I notice that Clackamas County seems to do a better job with their traffic lights and controls than Multnomah County. Except 82nd and around Clackamas Town Center.

Jimbo: To build a bridge that has no more lanes than now is stupid. No point in spending money we don't have or won't have to put the same thing in that provides nothing more than we now have, just to have it look nicer.

It seems you don't know why the bridge is being built. It's not to "look nicer."

How about a no-build option. The Interstate bridge doesn't appear to have structural problems.

Lets live with it and not pay any tolls. A generation later we can revisit the issue with a better grasp of energy prices, type of vehicles we have and the lifestyles being lived.

The light rail option should then be shelved unless Clark county comes begging.

Skep, that works for me.

Think of all the money they'd save.

If you aren't going to have more traffic lanes it's not going to do anything to improve traffic flow anyway.

And I'd bet the traffic morons would take one of the lanes that is there now and on the new bridge make it a HOV lane. They are stupid.

I agree with everything that Jimbo says. You can apply those same issues to Clark County.

The light rail option should then be shelved unless Clark county comes begging.

That's the smartest thing I've heard about the bridge yet!

Skeptical: How about a no-build option. The Interstate bridge doesn't appear to have structural problems.

No-build has always been an option.

Lets live with it and not pay any tolls.

The problem with not building a new bridge now (and I am not saying I favor or oppose it) is that it takes years to design and build a new bridge, and the longer we wait, the more it will cost later. I'm not sure it's a great idea to wait til it's required.

The current bridge - really two identical bridges built 40 years apart - are a bit old and probably maintenance headaches. One of the bridges is almost 100 years old. And as we know, both spans go up often, requiring traffic stoppages that gridlock traffic.

Even though the new bridge will have the same number of through-lanes, they will be wider, and the interchanges would be better able to handle on/off traffic. Project proponents claim the current bridge is a frequent accident hot spot and that it's not seismically safe, either.

The light rail option should then be shelved unless Clark county comes begging.

Light rail on any new bridge should be shelved until they build an express system on the Oregon side that would get people from Vancouver to Portland as quickly as the current C-Tran express busses. Who wants to give up those nice buses for a train that takes 2X-3X longer??

I find it interesting that traffic engineering and transportation planning is considered to be "like the weather" -- everyone who has a driver's licence is now qualified to practice traffic engineering and transportation planning.

I have been in the business of transportation planning for over 20 years and most of the things that drive you nuts are exactly the things that drive us in the profession nuts.

Like on the radio side, the talent doesn't call the shots -- the owner(s) of the station does. In transportation planning, it is the elected officials who control the land use and the transportation investment decisions that call the shots. Most of us in the profession could give the public a stellar system with great performance if you give us an infinite amount of resources OR infinite control over the land use side of the equation.

The dirty secret of transportation planning is that in a "free market" society there is no ability to provide that stellar system. If they build the Columbia River Crossing to 3 through lanes, 5 through lanes, 500 through lanes ... it doesn't matter. The free market will react to "mine" that capacity for the individual benefit of the property owners whose land increases in value due to the increase accessibility or mobility. That mining process will continue until all of the mobility is consumed and those commuting face the same experience that those consuming now. The only difference in providing 3 versus 5 versus 500 is how far to the north in Washington State you want to sea of single family tract homes to spread.

All the addition of tolls to the equation is to provide a politically palatable method of funding and to allow the opportunity to use pricing to shift demand from automobile use to transit use. Right now most transit use in Portland is still to and from the downtown. The system is built that way because the air pollution control measure of the 1970s -- the downtown parking cap -- made parking pricing the effective "toll" on driving to downtown Portland. If it weren't for the parking cap, there probably would not be light rail in this region.

What I really find interesting is that the short run game for the Oregon side should be to maximize the number of lanes on the bridge so that Washington continues to be a bedroom to the Oregon side. Income tax revenue with very little expenditure... of course, if the Washington side of the region gets too populated then it will have a voting weight at the Federal level that would address the imbalance in taxes and services provided. So the long term game for Oregon is to try to keep the Washington side growth as compact as possible while still providing an outlet for economic pressure to expand the Oregon side urban boundaries.

By the way, most of the traffic signals that you see in suburban areas are installed because a developer's banker said that he wouldn't finance that strip mall without a signal to get out on the arterial street. The agency reviewing the traffic studies may not want the signal but eventaully the developer and his/her political contributions usually win at the elected official lavel...

If I sound cynical... 11 years of my more than 20 were in a local agency dealing with developers, elected officials (the good and the really bad) and those in the public who felt their driver's license trumped my years of experience and Masters in Civil Engineering!

and those in the public who felt their driver's license trumped my years of experience and Masters in Civil Engineering!

Well, doesn't it?

Skeptical... only if the public is willing to pay for the transportation system they think they want.... :-)

Edust1958, thanks for confirming the signal bit. On a long drive once we conjectured the signals were all about eyeball time for the road signs.]

Toss up some neon, mix with board drivers, and you've got nice impressions daily, on the public dime!!

I've also always thought the amount of lanes does not matter. If there are lanes, people will fill them, period. 2, 10 whatever. They will just be full in a fairly short amount of time.

Your observations about the WA growth side are interesting to me, and a perspective I've not had before. Thanks for that food for though this morning!

I remain opposed to tolls. There are other means and methods to regulate flow, and pay for things. One of the very nice things about living here is the lean travel cost burden we have! Tolls impact lower income people far more than anybody else.

These last three years, for me personally, have seen me on a full tank, just riding it out until payday. Been ugly. Tolls would have made that a lot uglier.

So then, if we are to have a toll (and I hope we don't), where are the upsides for it, in terms of jobs and urban planning?

I've not thought about it that way before, and it's interesting! Anyone care to speculate on that?

(could be an answer that favors a toll, you never know!)

The strongest arguments for tolling roadways, in my opinion, are:
1) If you are really a believer of user-pay for scarce resources, a toll charges only the user of the facility for the capacity of the facility being used at the time of use. If you use the facility when traffic is light, your toll should be very very low. If you want to use the facility when traffic is heavy, your toll should be as high as needed to keep performance acceptable.
2) That latter point -- variable pricing -- is critical to good modern tolling. The price needs to be dynamic so that those paying the toll have some assurance of getting through the tolled corridor within a reasonable length of time.

The problem with congestion is not congestion in and of itself. In an economically successful urban area there will always be congestion. The real problem with congestion is the lack of predictability. If I know the travel time from Vancouver to Hillsboro is going to be 1 hour consistently, I can build that commute into my personal time budget. It really becomes a problem when one day it is 1 hour and the next it is 3 hours! That is one of the big advantage of a solid separated-facility transit system -- professional drivers and postive control systems results in consistent travel times. So the big advantage of tolling is using economic incentive to balance the demand on a limited corridor to produce consistent travel times.

I am only skimming the surface of this discussion but just like radio -- technology is changing the rules of transportation game and what we had in the past is not what we will have in the future. I suspect for the most part, the tolling bell has been rung. I cannot see the general public or the federal elected officials getting the type of gas tax increase or the size of targeted federal grant needed to address the investment that will be needed on the Columbia River Corridor.

This of course, is my personal professional opinion, and does not reflect the opinions of my private employer, who shall remain nameless.

Edust,
I read everything you said. I stand by my original statements. Some intersections maintain flow smoothly. Many do not. My observations have nothing to do with your design philosophy or criteria. Or your education or background.

I compare it to weather forecasting on the radio. I can be driving around town and the skies are clear. The weather "report" on the hour will say, currently it is cloudy outside and a temperature of ..... Well, I look around at the time at pure blue sky or at night, stars all over the place. You can read all the statistics and reports you want but sometimes you just need to go look out the window and see what it is doing. I called KXL one night shortly after I heard Tim Thompson say such a thing and asked him why he doesn't just look out the window to see what the currents are? He said they just go by what the conditions are at the airport/reporting station. I told him that I just came from the airport and where the weather bureau was and it was clear there, also. Not a cloud in the sky.

Same can be said for traffic planners and signal controller program writers. Forget your theory and just go outside and observe and use common sense. There seems to be a lack of it in traffic signal controls. Especially in this area. I do a lot of driving around the country and I must say that some of the worst traffic control systems in operation are here. Forget Seattle and LA. I just spent two minutes at 12:45 this morning sitting eastbound on Burnside where it crosses Stark in Rockwood for a red light. It was green on Stark with no traffic for a minute. There were no Max trains in sight. The light changed to red on Stark. There were 3 cars going westbound on Burnside, waiting for the light to change. No one was in the left turn lane. When all lights, including 190th, were red for 20 seconds before the the westbound light turned green and those 3 cars moved. We still had a red light for another minute before ours turned green. During that minute, there was no traffic anywhere but us 2 cars sitting and waiting.
That is dumb. I can point to similar situations all over town. It is stupid. We are sitting there idling for no apparent reason, burning gas and contributing to excess emissions for those that believe in global warming.

Fix the damn signal systems to be more efficient. It should not be that hard to do or write an algorithm to figure it out. I have written custom application programs to control manufacturing processes and equipment and if I had left it with the customer working like the traffic control systems, the customers would never have paid it off until I fixed it.

it usually becomes:toll-now,toll-forever!!!??i.e. no such thing as a temporary toll!!

62kgw: it usually becomes:toll-now,toll-forever!!!??i.e. no such thing as a temporary toll!!

...except the last time they tolled the bridge, when the toll was removed after the bridge had been paid for.

In this case, they are proposing to toll to discourage drivers, not just collect revenue, so it is intended from the outset to be a perpetual toll. No surprise there.

Oh and to add to the common sentiment that I didn't comment on in my earlier post.

My sister lives on the North Shore of Chicago. I flew into Midway (the ghetto airport in Chicago) and had to drive from the SE side of the city to the North end. It was one of the scariest highway driving experiences of my life.

Jimbo,
I hope you weren't reading any disagreement with you in my posts. Most traffic signals are not efficiently timed because you can't achieve the a global, a corridor and an single signal optimum all at once. If the corridor is coordinated for one of the streets, the penalty is paid by the cross streets.

There are some adaptive systems out there that offer some promise for the problem that you identified in your post. They essentially optimize on the fly ... based on information the controller gets from the upstream traffic flow. The best system I have seen in operation requires digital cameras that can provide a good resolution image for a dedicated processer to determine approaching traffic speed. It is not an inexpensive investment in technology but the results are impressive.

I think the only impediment to making the improvements is the cost of the upgrading all of the hardware -- some of it is electro-mechanical in nature, installed in the 1950's and still running ... maybe on the same settings it had when it was installed!

By the way, my first name is Evan... (the "e" in my username.

Why not keep the bridge we have, and use the money to bribe people to carpool/ride transit/shift schedule? We'd only have to reduce bridge use by a fairly small percentage in order to make traffic flow smoothly.

And I've asked this question several times in the past with no satisfactory answer... what good is a 12 lane bridge if it's feeding into a 6 lane freeway? It doesn't seem likely that I5 through NoPo will be widened anytime soon, and in any case there will still be a bottleneck at the Fremont bridge. I don't see that being redesigned anytime soon either.

There are only 6 through-lanes (wider than the existing bridge's lanes though). The "12 lanes" comes from the fact that there are some feeder lanes/onramps etc. into the new bridge that will make traffic flow more smoothly. That's supposedly one of the drawbacks of the current bridge design that causes more traffic and accidents. Oh, and room for MAX.

I have a question.

It's unrelated to tolls, but is related to the Interstate Bridge.

Why do people insist on slowing down to 40 mph or so on the bridge. It backs up traffic all the way to downtown most days.

Then when they get to the north side of the bridge they go like scalded ass apes. (not to be confused with a face removing chimpanzee!!)

It's almost like the bridge scares them.

One thing that would alleviate a lot of the jam up would be if people would just keep up a decent speed across the bridge.

Anyway, that's my rant for now!

LOL!!

The bridge does scare a lot of people.

"Why do people insist on slowing down to 40 mph or so on the bridge. It backs up traffic all the way to downtown most days."

My guess is the massive flow of traffic hitting the bridge by the Expo Center/Jantzen Beach. Lots of people try to shoot up the Grand/MLK corridor and hit I-5 near the bridge, and the Interstate Bridge cannot handle the influx of merging traffic. Thus, the backup. Both on MLK and I-5.

I can count on one hand (and still have fingers down) how many traffic jams I have been stuck in since moving back to Spokane. I don't miss them one iota.

I think they should bulldoze Hooters at Jantzen Beach and build a new on-ramp right there. The current one is just not in the right place and causes way to much traffic slowdown.

The slow down on the bridge is a mixture of:
(1) A sudden increase in volume from the MLK corridor being combined with I-5 flow,
(2) No real acceleration lane for traffic geting on at Jantzen Beach,
(3) Trucks that can't maintain speed on the very steep (for loaded trucks0 grade of the "hump" on that particular bridge design -- I don't know the exact grade but it does have a very visible hump.
(4) Vehicles of all types that are expecting to brake in order to exit at either SR-14 eastbound or the Vancouver City Center exit.

The auxilliary (or as the CRC public relations team called them -- drop/add) lanes are meant to address the issue of vehicles needing time to accelerate to freeway speed or to decelerate to exit.

The new bridge designed to the appropriate Interstate standards will allow trucks to maintain speed.

People definitely are afraid of bridges! (not me of course!) The Interstate Bridge has grating, not blacktop, and that can make people especially nervous. I know some people who are terrified to drive across the Marquam and Fremont Bridges especially, just because they are up so high.

I think the Janzten Beach on/off ramp right before the bridge going north causes a great deal of congestion, because lots of people have to switch lanes in both directions to get off/on there. I think this is one issue the new bridge is supposed to fix.

We don't want people who are scared at 40MPH to be driving 60MPH.

can count on one hand (and still have fingers down) how many traffic jams I have been stuck in since moving back to Spokane.

Yeah, rush hour there is from 7:55 to 8:00!!!

Just kidding!

DT, yeah, that on ramp and the WA 14 off ramp are piss poor. Add to that the fact that 90% of the drivers are too stupid to know how to merge properly and you have a mess.

According to KATU and the Portland Tribune, the new I-5 Bridge will have tolls. Also to begin tolling, the I-205 Glenn Jackson Bridge.

http://www.katu.com/news/40861807.html

http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=123636862528460600

I'll bet once all is said and done, there will be no tolls.

Personally, I'm against tolls. Just raise the gas tax or registration fees to get the money needed. The entire state benefits as a result of this corridor.

Well both sides, ideally, should raise regestration fees. Washington has the highest gas tax in the US as is, there would be an uproar statewide if it went up to help fund a new Interestate Bridge. Both states, there would be a LOT of pissed off folks outside of the Portland/Vancouver metro area ... folks in Medford, or Spokane, won't want part of funding it. Hell people here bitch too much about so much of our tax money going to fund Seattle projects as is!

Maybe the Tri-County area in Oregon, and Clark County can impose a surcharge on vehicle registration fees to help cover the cost?

What if the registration surcharge needed to be in the four digit range? Figure it out -- if the one way toll at peak is over $2.50 then a typical commuter is going to be paying $20 a work week and with roughly 50 work weeks per year -- that is $1,000/year! That doesn't account for the non-work trips which are outside of the peak that would be paying less but are much more of them.

Wouldn't folks play the game of suddenly finding a way to register their vehicle in Woodland... or Kelso... or Hood River... Salem?

This is a mega project that will require mega funding... that is why if there isn't a toll there probably won't be a bridge.

What kills me about places like Spokane and Medford when they bitch about too much tax money going to Portland or Seattle, the fact is, those cities and counties receive WELFARE from Portland and Seattle. They should thank the big cities for their subsidy, not bitch about them.

The donor / recipient county/city issue for transportation funding is a losing discussion.

Highly populated areas tend to have great need for capacity and generate significant amounts of motor vehicle fuel tax. They usually, despite the greater need, end up being donors.

The far reaches of the geo-political district tend to have fewer capacity needs but usually represent the linkages that allow the populated areas to interact with other populated areas.

In others words... while Portland has big needs and generates lots of revenue... Portland residents occasionally like to drive to the coast or San Francisco. To make that drive, you need to travel on roads in relatively unpopulated locations... if Portland wasn't a donor area, the potholes would be big enough that you'd need a 4x4 to get to the coast!

Of course, if you don't think you are getting your fair share in the allocation of tax revenue, you could always advocate for a user-pay system.... every road a toll road!

"What kills me about places like Spokane and Medford when they bitch about too much tax money going to Portland or Seattle, the fact is, those cities and counties receive WELFARE from Portland and Seattle. They should thank the big cities for their subsidy, not bitch about them."

You're right. I have made that argument here with people that complain about the "damn West-Siders". I was just making a point of the mentality.

Highway funds are appropriated porportionately for needs. I'm sorry, but the needs of Clark County and King/Pierce/Snohomish County are much higher than they are in Spokane County, and they're going to get the bulk of the funds ...