TED KULONGOSKI

Proposals for highway congestion pricing and electronic tolling advanced this week in the San Francisco Bay Area, metro Portland and Seattle-Puget Sound. Here’s a rundown. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that in the Bay Area, the Municipal Transportation Commission yesterday approved a funding plan that would establish regional High Occupancy and Toll (HOT) lanes on 800 of the region’s 1,200 miles of highway lanes by 2025. Existing and under-construction carpool, or High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes, would be converted to electronically-tolled HOT lanes which would be free to HOVs, transit and motorcycles and also open to solo drivers for a fee that varies according to time of day and congestion level. In addition, new HOT lanes would be built, creating Read More ›

Suppose electricity was free, even at hours of peak usage. Think your power supply would be reliable, then? Exactly. Now apply the same common-sense approach to highway capacity. Or consider the Environmental Defense Fund’s Transportation Director Michael Replogle, who writes in the Washington Post: Congestion pricing may be controversial to some people, but it’s inevitable. Using tolls simply to build more roads is a costly way to end up with even more traffic and pollution….Done right, congestion pricing can boost the efficiency of our existing roads, raise revenue to invest in transit, and reduce pollution that causes asthma, cancer, heart disease, impaired lung development and global warming….In the long run, congestion pricing is the only effective and economically and politically Read More ›

In a recent speech to the Oregon Environmental Council’s Business Forum, Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski (below, right) said the transportation plan he’ll present to the 2009 state legislature will likely accent congestion pricing. It could also include a statewide low-carbon fuel standard in synch with California’s, and incentives for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. More, first from from The Oregonian. Gov. Ted Kulongoski…said he will likely advocate for rush-hour tolling and other tough measures to control traffic congestion in his 2009 appeal to the Legislature. “In plain English, tolls that vary by time of day, by location, or by congestion level, so that those who are using the highway at the most desirable time are paying more to do so,” he Read More ›

Have you ever seen a whole lot more of the mighty Columbia River and Portland’s skyline than you really wanted to, because you were crawling on Interstate 5? C’mon, raise your hands. Well, good news. The government is here to help. And so are you and I. Probably. The Oregonian’s Dylan Rivera reports today that at a meeting yesterday of the 39-member Columbia River Crossing Task Force, tolls emerged as a likely ingredient in the recipe to fund a fix for the badly-congested Interstate Bridge corridor on I-5. The early and perhaps rose-colored estimate is that tolls would range from $1.28 each way during off-peak hours to $2.56 at peak periods. They would be collected electronically, and provide an estimated Read More ›