After stressing funding shortfalls facing King County Metro's bus service and declining gas tax revenues for road projects, Carlyle explores several important macro-level policy options for funding improved mobility.
...the long-term, big picture is important and we can’t let the battles over the tunnel, 520 bridge and other mega projects be a conversation killer about our broader structural challenges. Several ideas are on the front burner. Tolling is making a comeback, as evidenced by the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and soon on the 520 bridge. It makes sense for the people who use facilities the most to pay a greater share of the construction and maintenance costs for a specific facility or geographic area....comprehensive regional tolling - with e-tags and other solutions to help make it easy logistically - makes good economic sense so long as we have a real action plan....
Another, if controversial, idea is charging according to vehicle miles traveled (VMT), tracked by a transponder. This would take into account actual road usage, whether or not a vehicle uses gasoline, electricity or something else. It also opens up some interesting new policy ideas such as integrating car insurance, parking (no more parking meters!), tolls, etc., into one system that is able to charge drivers accordingly and accurately. Obviously, a concern about privacy is one major obstacle to this idea, so we’ll have to continue looking at innovative ways to address this very legitimate concern.....
A third option is the car-tab fee model and using the funds for direct transportation services so the money doesn’t disappear into the institutional bureaucracy of government but rather goes for real services on the ground.
Kudos to Rep. Carlyle for highlighting in a community forum the need to develop long-term surface transportation funding strategies. Regional (electronic, time-variable) tolling and further consideration of a vehicle mileage tax - along with a local-option motor vehicle excise tax applied at annual license renewal time - are all important options that our Cascadia Center and others have advocated.
More than that, Carlyle's commentary is especially timely.
The bill...proposes a market-based "carbon trading" plan that mirrors a European system initiated in 2005. This plan requires polluters to obtain government-issued "carbon credits," which then allow them to pollute above the agreed-on limit....the Waxman-Markey plan...gives 85% of the pollution credits to the biggest polluters for free....
In Europe, the distribution of free pollution credits to industries failed to establish a strong carbon market. In turn, the weak market in carbon credits failed to generate the money needed to fund new technology. And because there was a glut of free credits, polluters that went over the emissions limit could buy the necessary credits cheaply. So important states, such as Britain, continue to exceed the pollution limits.
Faced with disappointing results, Europe began auctioning off more of the credits in 2006. But the damage was done....The complex European trading scheme, started with free pollution credits, has not produced dramatic cuts in pollution or dramatic developments in technology or a robust market in carbon credits. The Financial Times of London was blunt: "Carbon markets leave much room for unverifiable manipulation. [Carbon] taxes are better, partly because they are less vulnerable to such improprieties."
For those who follow transportation policy closely, last week was an eventful one.
The week started with a June 22 release by the House Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) Committee of its 775-page draft surface transportation bill, a "blueprint" of which had been released the previous week. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s decision (also released the previous week) to seek an 18-month extension of the existing surface transportation law was met with approval by some, regret and resignation by others, and incredulity and defiance by still others. In seeking a delay, Secretary LaHood joined a growing body of doubters that the crowded legislative calendar - controversial climate legislation, contentious health care reform, a Supreme Court confirmation, among others - would permit the House and the Senate to reach agreement on a new bill before the current law expires at the end of September. Our first priority, the Secretary said, must be to fix the Highway Trust Fund shortfall so that money continues to flow to the states without interruption.
The urgency of acting promptly, i.e. before the Highway Trust Fund runs dry in mid-August, was reinforced by a June 22 letter from Governors Ed Rendell (PA) and James Douglas (VT), to the congressional leadership. Writing in their capacity as chairman and vice-chairman respectively of the National Governors Association, they urged the lawmakers to pass an extension to eliminate the impending shortfall "as soon as possible" so that states can continue planning for and funding critical highway programs. The letter left a clear implication that the governors considered ensuring the continuity of funding offered by Sec. LaHood’s proposal to take precedence over a long-term reform of the program - especially given the uncertainty of finding the money to pay for the long-term program.
Further support for the Administration’s proposal came from the Senate side.
Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee unveiled a blueprint for the next surface transportation authorization bill on June 18 to generally positive reviews (long version of blueprint here). However he left two key questions unanswered: Can the bill be enacted this year? and, Where will the money to fund the ambitious $500 billion program come from?
Today in Washington, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood unveiled the long-awaited guidelines that states and regions will use to compete for economic recovery funds for high-speed rail.
"The time has finally come for the United States to get serious about building a national network of high-speed rail corridors we can all be proud of,” Secretary Ray LaHood said. “High-speed rail can reduce traffic congestion and link up with light rail, subways and buses to make travel more convenient and our communities more livable.”
According to the LaHood's statement, the "guidelines...require rigorous financial and environmental planning to make sure projects are worthy of investment and likely to be successful."
It's common enough to hear that we need more tolling in urban regions to help fund maintenance, repair and extension of highways (not to mention the time-saving benefits of tolled express lanes). But tolling in Wyoming, a.k.a. "Big Wyoming" and "the Cowboy State," population 493,782? What gives?
Here's what: Interstate 80 across Wyoming is wearing down, traffic is expected to more than double by 2037, and money is scarce. As the Interstate Atlas shows, I-80 is an important route to our Cascadia region, via a short spur to I-84, which then runs through Boise to Portland and I-5 just south of the border with Washington; in Sacramento, it also connects directly with I-5, the major artery defining the West Coast Corridor from the U.S.-Mexico border to the U.S.-Canada border. I-80 runs the length of the country, east to west. Trucks will comprise 57 percent of the I-80 load in Wyoming in 2037, up from about half now. Forty percent of the highway in the state is in poor to moderate condition, and 50 percent will need major rehabilitation by 2013. So, as the Laramie Boomerang reports, the state is already in the second phase of an I-80 tolling study that's looking at several options to fund current and future road maintenance needs. Tolling would be electronic, with vehicle and license plate cameras and radar detectors mounted above the highway. The main options are:
tolling I-80 in Wyoming at 30 cents per mile for heavy trucks and 3 cents per mile for passenger vehicles (two possible configurations);
employ tolling to help pay for construction of a third lane in each direction for heavy trucks only on I-80 in Wyoming.
Operators could stand to pay up to $116 per truck in tolls to cross the state, according to the Wyoming Department of Transportation. Any more and they would tend to divert to other routes. Permission is required from the Federal Highway Administration to toll interstate highways, but this would likely pose no obstacle because the federal government simply lacks the resources its gas tax once provided for highway upkeep and construction, after four decades of steep growth in highway usage and ever-mounting maintenance and expansion needs. Tolling has already been allowed and implemented on a number of other interstates. And Wyoming's own gas tax, for better or worse, is a scant 14 cents per gallon and unlikely to be hiked by any significant degree. That Mustang won't ride.
Unlike more urbanized locales, the issue is upkeep, not that plus congestion. Wyoming's prescient attempt to figure out how to keep I-80 in good repair is a useful reminder that highways we may take for granted aren't free to maintain. The story also underscores the crucial role of freight in the economy. It's great to buy local when we can, but that's often simply not possible. All lofty rhetoric aside, we want what we want when we want it, and price matters. So, there are lots of trucks rumbling down I-80 through Wyoming, and many more to come. Take the same reality and multiply the traffic volumes exponentially, and you begin to get the scope, nationally. Moving more freight via rails is a good idea - and should be pursued energetically. But that too will take many billions of dollars, in this case for new infrastructure, and serve only a portion of growing freight volume.
In addition to evaluating specific in-state revenue scenarios, the study consultants - Parsons Brinkerhoff - will also produce a stand-alone memo reporting on outreach to neighboring states along I-80 (Nebraska and Utah) on a joint approach to tolling the corridor, and the possibility of pursuing a public-private partnership to help assure the highway's continued viability.
As for the main menu options right now, a first-phase feasibility study completed last October by Parsons seems to all but rule out the new, tolled truck-only lanes as too expensive, at $7 billion, leaving two other "all lanes tolled" possibilities. One - the so-called "baseline" alternative - would entail no expansion of the highway and raise $3.01 billion between 2009 and 2037, with the lowest annual maintenance and operations costs. The other would add a lane in each direction, with each inside (left) lane for cars only, and trucks keeping to the right except to use the center lane for passing. This would cost $2.8 billion, with tolling raising $3.21 billion by 2037. The feasibility study also indicates additional funds could be generated if a politically-problematic attempt to raise the state's exceptionally low fuel taxes succeeded.
Although the feasibility study is only a first-phase product and more detailed analysis including community input is occurring now, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the baseline alternative - with its $3 billion in revenues and lowest costs by far - will be the final choice. Maintenance and operations needs include work already forestalled, ongoing work with annual price tag of at least $25 million, and an every-15-years major rehabilitation and repair program that actually unfolds over the course of several years. According the feasibility study, that latter effort alone would cost about $1.1 billion in the cycle pegged to 2024.
Results of the current, second phase of the I-80 tolling study will be presented September 1 to the Wyoming legislature.
As part of our recent Cascadia Rail Week, Cascadia Center hosted a gathering at Novelty Hill Winery In Redmond, where officials from the Sonoma-Marin commuter rail line recently approved by voters discussed their plans with supporters of Puget Sound's Eastside commuter rail initiative, which would use parts, and eventually all, of the BNSF's underutilized Snohomish-to-Renton corridor. In today's Seattle Times, editorial page columnist Lance Dickie, who attended the session, writes:
Connections between where people live and work are the essence of public transit. The 42-mile Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail corridor between the cities of Snohomish and Renton — including a spur from Woodinville to Redmond — is ripe with potential. Or so it seemed in 2007, when the Port of Seattle said it would buy the line for $107 million and issue bonds to raise the cash. In March, the Port announced the sale was postponed because the nation's credit markets were frozen. In the absence of a financial thaw, the Port has not said what comes next. The lingering question of who will buy and preserve the right of way along the corridor splashes cold water on the excitement about a rail-and-trail combination between growing Eastside population centers.
In late May, the Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center hosted state and federal lawmakers, mayors, and state and local transportation officials at meetings in Portland and Seattle to learn more about high-speed rail from Oregon's Willamette Valley to the Canadian border. They were also looking at how freight lines have been converted to multiple-use corridors that accommodate walkers, cyclists, commuter rail and freight. Portland's metropolitan transportation agency, Tri-Met, recently opened the Westside Express Service, 14.7 miles of rail and five stations.
Cascadia's template for the Eastside rail corridor might well be the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit District, which is installing passenger rail service and a 12-foot-wide path for pedestrians and cyclists along 70 miles of Northwestern Pacific Railroad right of way. John Nemeth, SMART's rail planning manager, spoke to a dinner gathering at Novelty Hill Winery in Woodinville. The setting was convivial, but the tourism potential of regional rail service is not lost on the local wine industry or the mayors from Bellingham, Leavenworth and Woodinville.
In California, from Cloverdale on the north to Larkspur on the south, the emphasis might appear to be on getting to a ferry connection to San Francisco. Instead, Nemeth said, commute patterns are changing to focus on population and job centers within the two counties. SMART is fueled by a quarter-cent sales tax passed in 2008 with 70-percent approval. Service begins in 2014.
According to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, SMART does face some financial challenges resulting from a downturn in expected sales tax revenues and changes in the bond market. The line's opening may be delayed slightly, or perhaps built to slightly less than the full 70-mile length at the outset. Many public transit systems, current and planned, face similar challenges at present. The solutions will lie jointly in an upturn in the economy, finding new ways to economize, and in some cases, developing ancillary funding tools.
It will still be a few years - at least - before plug-in hybrid electric vehicles with much lighter, more reliable and less costly battery packs come to market, at truly consumer-friendly prices and in large numbers. Why should we care if and when that happens? Because: It gets very problematic very fast when we get much our current fuel for passenger vehicles, bus transit, air travel, surface freight, and operation of construction equipment from foreign regimes hostile to our nation and our very way of life; regimes which not coincidentally may also happen to fund terrorism directed at us. Then there are gas prices, now creeping back toward three dollars a gallon - not good. Add in the effects of fossil fuel emissions on air quality and greenhouse gas levels, and stir.
Hence the search for more secure and green sources of fuel, from renewables-powered electricity, and - one day hopefully not to far off - widely available, second-generation net-green biofuels (algae, biomass, cellulosic methanol, anyone?).
As the Natural Resources Defense Council points out, today's popular hybrid vehicles such as the Toyota Prius are able to run on electricity only when the battery is charged by the onboard gas engine or regenerative braking; in contrast, plug-in hybrids charge up, first, directly from household (or other similar) outlets, and when that electricity runs out then they run as conventional hybrids. They use less fuel than conventional hybrids, and won't let you get stranded when the charge runs out, as can occur with purely electric vehicles. Although to be fair, reasonable trip planning can obviate that problem with EVs, and efforts are underway to develop a public charging infrastructure for EVs and PHEVs - one important example being Washington State Rep. Deb Eddy's HB 1481, passed into law recently. Then too, some of the world's top engineers, including those at U.S. national laboratories in the Northwest, are continuing vital research into how peak-period demand on the electrical grid can be managed in the future, when many, many fleet and personal PHEVs might be charging, during after-work hours. At the same time, engineers are also looking at how charging durations can be sped up - particularly in public locations along urban region arteries and interstate highway corridors.
Despite the promise of both PHEVs and EVs, informed skepticism isn't hard to find these days, especially with respect to the plug-ins. Even from the quarters of our nation's highest-profile advocate of green transportation, the White House. Earlier this year, prior to you and I becoming majority owners of ailing automaker General Motors, President Barack Obama's advisors issued a "Viability Determination" that included this warning on GM's new PHEV model, the Chevrolet Volt:
GM is at least one generation behind Toyota on advanced, “green” powertrain development. In an attempt to leapfrog Toyota, GM has devoted significant resources to the Chevy Volt. While the Volt holds promise, it is currently projected to be much more expensive than its gasoline-fueled peers and will likely need substantial reductions in manufacturing cost in order to become commercially viable.
While the Volt might not be the perfect solution to reducing petroleum consumption--for one thing, at a rumored $40,000 apiece, it will be too expensive to sell in very large numbers--it seems at the least to be a step in the right direction. Indeed, it represents an overall direction that the administration supports, as seen by its emphasis on plug-in hybrids....GM will likely sell all of its first run of Volts, even at their high cost (more than 48,000 people have indicated that they want to buy the Volt). And economies of scale and advances in battery technology could bring costs down, allowing more people to buy the car. The wait would be worth it. Eventually, plug-in hybrids could allow most people to commute without using any gasoline.
Even with "dirty"-powered electricity there's a net green gain at the tailpipe, versus an engine burning traditional gasoline. And if the electricity comes from renewables, as policy-makers and the private sector will increasingly seek to ensure, that's even better. Meanwhile, GM has opened a new advanced battery laboratory. Call it a sign of the times. But what about PHEV mileage? Some pilot program tests drew skepticism when miles per gallon turned out to be less than hyped. Turns out there's a fairly simple answer, report experts interviewed by National Public Radio's "Market Watch" in a segment aired just two days ago: achieving top-range PHEV mileage depends on driver education, and sometimes, making sure to plug in your plug-in when it's resting.
James Francfort tracks plug-in hybrids for the Department of Energy:
JAMES FRANCFORT: We've demonstrated the potential to get 100, 200, 300, up to 400 miles-per-gallon depending on how the vehicles are driven.
Trouble is in early tests, Francfort found plug-ins hybrids weren't necessarily getting much better gas mileage than conventional hybrids.
Paul Scott of Plug in America says it's all about teaching consumers how to drive the cars.
PAUL SCOTT: You have to obviously charge the batteries.
Some test drivers weren't, and that meant the cars relied more on gas. And gunning the engine does the same thing. So if the cars are sold without any thought to consumer training:
SCOTT: Well, in that case then people might not buy them.
But if consumers are properly educated, Ed Kjaer (of Southern California Edison) says drivers could change their priorities.
The first thing you need to know about KIRO-FM 97.3 News Talk host Dori Monson is that when he says he's "filled full of Diet Coke, caffeine and righteous rage," he's not kidding. Okay, maybe he's exaggerating a bit, showman that he is. Let's just say he's a high-energy guy and a strenuous advocate of fiscal accountability and limited taxes, as I was reminded yesterday in an hour-long session with Dori and some of his many listeners. We were discussing a proposal for a seamless system of tolled express lanes on the Puget Sound region's highways and major state routes, that I outlined in a piece recently published at Crosscut, titled, "Flexible Tolling: The Key To Solving Our Congestion." It was then highlighted again, the day before yesterday, in a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article by their transportation reporter Aubrey Cohen. (Note the comments from State Treasurer Jim McIntyre, among other things, in Cohen's piece.)
On the show I outlined why we at Cascadia Center believe a connected system of tolled express lanes on major highways and state routes is one key part a of a future-facing strategy to help ensure regional mobility, transportation choices and economic security, as Central Puget Sound's population continues to grow - by about 40 percent over the next 30 years.
Here's the MP3 file of the hour; and here's the full transcript. For now, I'll leave you with my closing thoughts to Dori after what diplomats would call "a frank exchange of views." This has to do with the distinction between tolling only a few specific facilities, such as bridges and tunnels, versus a more comprehensive approach based on highway corridors.
Are bits and pieces better? Or is the seamless approach better? Remember the old HOV lanes? They'd end, and you'd be frustrated. Well, if we're going to have tolled express lanes, it should be in a continuous, seamless system. We'll get more bang for our buck, and better service.
Will more Washington roads take their toll on drivers? That's the question posed in the headline of an article written by Aubrey Cohen of the seattlepi.com today, and which quotes my colleague, Cascadia Center Senior Fellow Matt Rosenberg extensively.
The country needs a general upgrade of infrastructure. Billions are now available through the stimulus bill, but still not enough. The emphasis on "shovel-ready" projects in the stimulus package, though understandable as a recession-fighter, is unhelpful when the need is for serious long term planning.
As most of our regular readers know, this week as part of Cascadia Rail Week, Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute (along with a host of industry and community co-sponsors listed at the end of this post) has been rekindling the debate about national high-speed passenger rail and especially the development of service in the Northwest's "Cascadia Corridor." With the strongest commitment to rail in generations (President Obama’s budget request is $8 billion to upgrade and expand rail lines), one of Cascadia’s longest running concerns is getting new life.
"Rail Week" began Tuesday evening at the Columbia Tower Club in downtown Seattle with a welcoming dinner honoring Vancouver, B.C.'s Mayor Gregor Robertson. It ends tonight with a closing dinner and discussion at Novelty Hill Winery in Woodinville, Wash., one of several of the cities on Seattle's "Eastside" that would be served by a 42-mile Eastside commuter "rails and trails" corridor from Snohomish in the north to Renton in the South. (View the week's agenda here.)
The Tuesday and Friday evening bookends are emblematic of the breadth of the rail week sessions as well as the issue as a whole. On the one hand, Cascadia is seeking solutions to national and regional passenger rail challenges, exemplified in part by Mayor Robertson's participation; the mayor is a strong advocate of high-speed passenger rail between his city and points south along the West Coast. On the other hand, Cascadia recognizes that the success and development of shorter commuter rail corridors such as Seattle's Eastside will be just as critical to the eventual overall health of a future passenger rail system in the Northwest and the country. "Rail Week," which has so far included a train excursion, policy-focused luncheon sessions, and a well-attended public lecture at Seattle's City Hall, has been designed to bring attention to both ends of the spectrum and everything in between.
Andrew Bary's recent piece "The Long and Binding Road," in Barron's has been widely noticed. "The credit market collapse and political opposition have all but killed the U.S. highway privatization trend," the respected commentator opined in his article. What is more, Bary wrote, the Indiana Toll Road deal "was one of the most illogical prices paid for any major piece of transportation infrastructure during the bubble period of 2005 to 2007," suggesting that Macquarie made a huge miscalculation. Gov. Mitch Daniel's comment ("It was the best deal since Manhattan was sold for beads...") did not help, implying that the State got the better of the naive Macquarie. The article concluded, "for toll road investors, what had promised to be a pleasant ride has turned into a painful trip," citing Macquarie's shares tumbling 50% in the past year.
It seems simple enough. Trains carry passengers between locations such as, say, Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle, Wash. When those passengers disembark, whether for business or pleasure, they spend money. When money is spent, those receiving it benefit.
So, it would also seem then, if all the stars were aligned to have Amtrak begin running a second daily train between Vancouver and Seattle, that officials would do what they could to make it happen -- that bureaucratic hiccups could be managed, addressed and not hold things up. But as in life, in governance and regulation oftentimes the simple becomes unnecessarily complex.
Population in the four counties of Central Puget Sound will have grown from the 2008 total of 3.6 million by another 1.4 million in 2040. Jobs will increase by 1.1 million, and - based on the region's collective proclivities to date - total vehicle miles travelled (VMT) by more than 40 percent. Barring some big paradigm shift, the percentage of daily "passenger" work trips (freight vehicles not included) which occur on transit will grow from 8 percent of the current (2006) total to only 9 percent in 2040. For far more numerous non-work passenger trips, the transit market share stays at a scant 2 percent between 2006 and 2040, according to recent modeling. The vast majority of daily passenger trips occur in cars now and then. For work it's more than four of five, for non-work, about nine of ten. (The rest are split between transit, walking and biking.) On the upside, there's a lot more ride-sharing for non-work trips; plus, per-capita VMT will continue to stay flat; and we can shave a bit off the expected growth in total VMT by meeting (elusive) regional growth strategy targets.
These are some of the conclusions in a March 2009 background paper that's part of the Puget Sound Regional Council's "Transportation 2040" planning effort. Future projections may change slightly under new computer modeling in a draft environmental impact statement due out at month's end. But you get the idea. The PSRC's 2040 picture begs a huge question: what to do about it all. And, as we'll see in a moment, it turns out that, away from the big transportation headlines it made last session, the state legislature has some ideas of its own.
My own take: A comprehensive approach to managing peak-hour highway capacity in Central Puget Sound should be launched by bravely establishing - and soon - a seamless regional system of variably-priced, automated and ultimately, corridor-length tolling on highways and major state routes. This must be folded into a broader plan to develop stable long-term funding for the region's surface transportation network.
SEATTLE-Most days it’s the marine life that causes the most stir at the Seattle Aquarium. But on this sunny afternoon, an attraction of a different sort was the center of attention. As cars and trucks drove by outside the aquarium on the earthquake-prone Alaskan Way Viaduct, inside the fate of the aging structure was being sealed. Surrounded by supporters, Washington’s Governor Christine Gregoire signed into law the bill that commits the State of Washington to tearing down the viaduct and replacing it with a deep-bored tunnel.
“This wasn’t an easy process,” said Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels as he welcomed a crowd of several hundred to the bill signing ceremony, “but it is done, it is done, it is done!” Truer words have rarely been spoken.
In a letter delivered to Canada's Minister of Public Safety Peter van Loan, a cross-border coalition made up of think tanks, business executives and elected officials encouraged the Canadian government to relax customs fees for train travel between Washington State and British Columbia. Cascadia Center's Bruce Agnew, who also serves as the co-chair of the PNWER Transportation Working Group is among the signatories of the letter.
"...we urge you to expand the fee waiver period from June 1, 2009 to June 1, 2010 to allow commencement of service as proposed by Amtrak and Washington State Department of Transportation."
As the commencement date for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver approaches, at issue in the immediate short term is the ability of "Amtrak to test and market the service (a second Amtrak Cascades train) during the busy summer tourism and cruise ship season."
The letter cites a study by the Border Policy Research Institute that found that "implementation of the service over a year would allow the federal, provincial and municipal governments in Canada to collect $1.87 million in GST, PST and room taxes combined as a result of increased passenger travel."
Click below to read the extended post and the coalition's letter.
U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Rep. James Oberstar (D.-Minn.) says, enough already with studies and pilot projects. Why not just phase in over the next two years the controversial vehicle mileage tax, in order to supplement and eventually replace the flailing gas tax? More from Associated Press:
..Oberstar...(pictured, right) said he believes the technology exists to implement a mileage tax. He said he sees no point in waiting years for the results of pilot programs since such a tax system is inevitable as federal gasoline tax revenues decline. "Why do we need a pilot program? Why don't we just phase it in?" said Oberstar, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman. Oberstar is drafting a six-year transportation bill to fund highway and transit programs that is expected to total around a half trillion dollars.
A congressionally mandated commission on transportation financing alternatives recommended switching to a vehicle-miles traveled tax, but estimated it would take a decade to put a national system in place. "I think it can be done in far less than that, maybe two years," Oberstar said at a House hearing. He was responding to testimony by Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., who recommended...pilot programs in every state to test the viability of a mileage-based tax. Blumenauer said public acceptance, not technology, is the main obstacle to a mileage-based tax. Pilot programs "would be able to increase public awareness and comfort and it would hasten the day we could make the transition," Blumenauer said.
Oberstar shrugged off that concern. "I'm at a point of impatience with more studies," Oberstar said. He suggested that Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chairman of the highways and transit subcommittee, set up a meeting of transportation experts and members of Congress to figure out how it could be done. The tax would entail equipping vehicles with GPS technology to determine how many miles a car has been driven and whether on interstate highways or secondary roads. The devices would also calculate the amount of tax owed.
Oberstar's comments may be based in part on savvy bargaining tactics. It's unlikely a nationwide plan for VMTs would be implemented in just a few years. But when it comes time for his committee and the House to sign off on the reauthorized surface transportation funding bill later this year, he can always justify a large appropriation for further (and important) investigations - and new state and multi-state pilot projects - by noting he's backing down from an earlier proposal of his to go much faster. In any case, the idea of the VMT isn't just to enrage taxpayers, though that's certainly a near-term downside. More from AP:
Gas tax revenues — the primary source of federal funding for highway programs — have dropped dramatically in the last two years, first because gas prices were high and later because of the economic downturn. They are forecast to continue going down as drivers switch to fuel efficient and alternative fuel vehicles.
...the challenges in continuing to provide a safe and free-flowing transportation network have never been greater. One of the biggest...is addressing the decline of revenues coming into the Highway Trust Fund, the main source of funds that pay for construction and maintenance on our expansive network of highways and bridges. Today, the highway trust fund is primarily supported by taxing fuel by the gallon (18.4 cents for gasoline and a 24.4 cents for diesel). Unfortunately, due to the sluggish economy, high gas prices and an increase in fuel efficiency, we are experiencing substantial declines in tax receipts into the trust fund. This method of using federal fuel taxes to fund our nation's highways and bridges is no longer adequate to support the growing infrastructure needs in the country. In fact, simply maintaining current levels of highway spending would result in a Highway Trust Fund deficit of about $70 billion by the end of the next highway bill.
In the short term, we are exploring numerous alternative financing mechanisms to increase revenues into the highway trust fund, because no single option will provide a complete solution. We must be willing to explore new options, including expanded use of public-private partnerships; and requiring all users, not just motorists, to contribute to the Highway Trust Fund. In the long term, to ensure that all those who use the system pay their fair share, transportation experts are discussing a user-funded fee for actual miles driven, known as a Vehicles Miles Tax. It is important to note that this system would not raise taxes, but replace the gas tax with a new more accurate collection mechanism.
Hmmnn. Anything that can unite James Inhofe and the deep green advocates at Grist magazine in Seattle, probably has legs. The University of Iowa's Public Policy Center is currently running a six-region VMT pilot project called The Road User Study. Participants will test the concept on the byways of Austin, Baltimore, the Research Triangle of North Carolina, Eastern Iowa, San Diego, and - this is interesting - Boise. They're using volunteers with on-board GPS devices in their cars, who will be billed by the miles they travel and which roads they use. They will not actually pay, but will report valuable information on how the system worked for them and under what circumstances they'd be willing to actually pay a VMT in the future. Results will include simulated revenue distribution to jurisdictions, and the thoughts of participants on travel information privacy. A major pilot project in Oregon found this concern could be addressed satisfactorily and that overall, test users would welcome implementation of a VMT system.
Many questions still remain, such as how VMT rates would be fitted to drivers of lower-weight, lower emission vehicles, and to rural area drivers. It's already clear that in populous metro regions, there must be some degree of discounts for avoiding crowded roads and highways during peak hours, as well as for ride-share and transit vehicles. Another issue is whether the system users will see more robust benefits from federal or state management of a VMT system. Gabriel Roth of the Independent Institute argues strongly here for the latter.
Chairman Obertar's "do it, already" view reflects some gamesmanship, or heartfelt impatience with the "study, study, study" ethic - or some of both. But his voice is an important one. Oberstar's strong support for the VMT concept is likely to accelerate the pace of adoption. Because it is already a question not of whether, but when, and exactly how.
With good cause, many people thought it might never happen. But on Friday, after seemingly endless debate and consideration, the Washington State legislature put its final stamp of approval on the decision to replace the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct with a deep-bored tunnel.
There's a lot to this story, politically and logistically. Ultimately, however, the success of the deep-bored tunnel alternative (agreed to by Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, and King County Executive Ron Sims), is a story of persistence, thoughtful analysis tethered to an understanding of advances in tunneling technology, and the triumph of consensus and cautious deliberation amongst a constellation of constituencies.
Cascadia Center was there every step of the way -- especially when the going got tough. Bruce Chapman, President and Founder of Cascadia Center's parent organization, Discovery Institute, wraps up the story nicely in this post.
Without Cascadia, as Friday's article from The Daily Journal of Commerce shows below, it wouldn't have been possible for tunneling experts to be assembled last fall to challenge the pessimistic numbers presented by the Department of Transportation that made a tunnel option seem unfeasible.
When I was nine I liked to poke a stick into ant nests I’d find in sidewalk cracks. Ants scattered in every conceivable direction. They ran in circles, they ran over and through each other. They screamed without logic. I was fascinated.
The state of professional transportation opinion in the US today is pretty much the same. The stick poked at the nest in this case was the report released by the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Finance Commission this February. The opening ant-scream was the spanking Obama’s Press Secretary Gibbs gave to Transportation Secretary Lahood. We professionals cringed in unison. Gibbs was in turn spanked next day by Congressman Oberstar, chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. We cheered. Of course the press went in every ant-direction imaginable for that and for the release of the NSTIFC’s Paying Our Way report 5 days later. Joe Motorist will have gleaned no real insight, and after fears were supplanted by next days’ tedious economic headlines will have simply forgotten, secure in the fact that opinion was sufficiently variable that no leader could possibly find a coherent position.
It seemed to me that in the weeks following the release of the report, US transportation professionals were – among friends – largely in favor of the key message in the report: “The gas-tax is a clever and simple idea whose time has run out and paying-for-use is the tax-shift to fix it.” We mocked Gibbs, commiserated with LaHood, and delighted in Oberstar’s defense – which had just vindicated all of us. On the whole we nodded in unison at the work of Rob Atkinson’s Congressional commission. Of course we would not all recommend spending the revenue the same way, but we all seemed aligned with the principles: meter all road use and pay according to number of miles traveled weighted by when and where the driving happened and of course by type of vehicle used.
With that in mind, I attended the April 14-15 Symposium on Mileage-Based User Fees (updated web page here) hosted in Austin by the Texas Transportation Institute’s University Transportation Center for Mobility, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, and Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota. This would be about my 20th symposium dealing with Road Use Charging in five years.
Slight decreases in traffic congestion due to the economic downturn are no reason to curtail aggressive transportation planning for looming population and employment growth in major metro regions. Despite the most fervent wishes of some planners, metro region growth in coming years will continue to be more away from, than to, high-density urban neighborhoods. This is due to due to several factors. For one, first- and second-ring suburbs have become regional employment centers, and cities in their own right. They are where people increasingly work, shop, play - and if finances permit, live. Examples in Central Puget Sound include Bellevue and Redmond to the east of Seattle, and (more affordable) Kent and Federal Way to the city's south. Second, there are still better housing values in mid- and outer-ring suburbs that lie beyond these locales. Value for money in housing has always been a big factor - even more so now. Third, suburban public schools are in a number of important ways less problematic compared to their urban counterparts.
For these and other reasons, central cities are no longer economically and culturally dominant. They will become even less so as population continues to move outward. One result is that daily travel patterns for the majority of a region's residents are - if not already a complex mosaic, or multi-stop "trip chain" - at least a far cry from the old school "hub and spoke" commuter routes going from suburbs to central city and back five days a week.
Advanced forms of ride-sharing aided by networked information systems are gradually coming into play, and telecommuting, one hopes, will become more widespread. But the future of highways and arterial roads in growing metro regions looks very busy. It could be said that ultimately the question is how best to modify behavior enough at the margins to stretch finite road capacity further. Because it is ultimately impossible, not to mention unthinkable, to enforce old-regime Soviet-style authority directing where people will live and work, and how and when and by what means they will travel, we are left instead with free-market incentives.
For signs of an enlightened modern approach beginning to emerge, look no further than the San Francisco Bay Area. It seems to get that while road capacity is not an unlimited resource, the region still must robustly address increased pressure on highway systems in years to come.
A related, and sweeping legislative proposal has been introduced in the current session of the California General Assembly. It stems from the earlier adoption by a regional agency of principles for a wide network of booth-less, cash-less electronically tolled express highway lanes. These would be free to transit and ride-share vehicles and available to solo drivers for an account-billed variable fee, based on real-time congestion levels.
An important marker on the pathway to implementing this system of "High Occupancy (and) Toll" lanes (HOT lanes) was adoption by The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the nine-county Bay Area regional transportation planning organization, in July 2008 of its HOT network principles. (See p. 3 for map).
The principles answer the question of why a region would consider such a plan, which involves converting existing carpool/transit-only or "HOV" lanes to more flexible HOT lanes, plus building new HOT lanes, while drawing upon the revenue raised by time-variable tolling of solo drivers. The MTC's stated principles are:
More effectively manage the region’s freeways in order to provide higher vehicle and passenger throughput and reduce delays for those traveling within each travel corridor;
Provide an efficient, effective, consistent, and seamless system for users of the network;
Provide benefits to travelers within each corridor commensurate with the revenues collected in that corridor, including expanded travel options and funding to support non-highway options that enhance effectiveness and throughput;
Implement the Express/HOT Lane Network in the Bay Area...using a rapid delivery approach that takes advantage of the existing highway right of way to deliver the network in an expedited time frame;
Toll revenue collected from the HOT network will be used to operate the HOT network, maintain HOT system equipment and software, provide transit services and improvements in the corridors, finance and construct the HOT network, and provide other corridor improvements.
Those principles gave rise to legislation, now pending. The MTC provides this important analysis of AB 744 to "authorize a Bay Area express lane network to deliver congestion relief and public transit funding with no new taxes," introduced by Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico, D-Fremont (pictured, right). The bill would authorize the MTC's corollary agency, the Bay Area Toll Authority, to finance, construct and operate a complete, seamless regionally-managed express lane networks on major highways. The system would:
convert 500 miles of existing or fully-funded HOV lanes to express HOT lanes;
build 300 miles of new express HOT lanes (180 miles to fill gaps, 120 miles to extend the system outward);
maintain free-flowing traffic for carpoolers, buses and toll-payers by adjusting tolls as congestion fluctuates;
yield $13.7 billion in revenues over 25 years, fully paying for its $7.6 billion cost, including construction, operations, maintenance, and enforcement, and providing an additional $6 billion for further transportation improvements in the highway corridors, including public transit;
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 million metric tons, versus the traditional HOV lanes approach;
boost the value of worker productivity by $100 billion by reducing highway delays.
According to the MTC analysis, AB 744 has some additional safeguards. It requires that 95 percent of the net revenue raised in each corridor be spent in that corridor for transit or emission reduction projects, and that the decisions about what such projects to implement be based on a bottom-up planning process giving ample voice to local input.
The MTC analysis also takes aim at a common canard that priced express lanes are "Lexus Lanes" mainly for the well-off. Nationally, the MTC reports, only 25 percent of priced express lane users are classified as high-income; and a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo study of SR 91 express lane users in Orange County found usage more closely tied to travel conditions and trip needs than income.
Bay Area transit planners have relatively limited options in trying to keep traffic moving in a region where growth continues to outpace the ability to build freeways or expand mass transit. Their challenge is to find ways to make better use of the transit and roadways we have. One such alternative is to create a seamless regional network of lanes for buses, carpoolers - and drivers willing to pay a toll.
We can certainly understand the instinctive groans at the concept of what transit planners call "high-occupancy toll" (or HOT) lanes - and critics deride as "Lexus lanes" that allow drivers with the means to pay a fee to glide past traffic. However, on closer review, the congestion relief produced by an enhanced network of express lanes would offer benefits to bus riders as well as drivers in the free lanes.
Cascadia Center does not endorse or oppose this bill. Our interest is in identifying surface transportation best practices, and ventilating related issues. Generally speaking, regional express lane systems are in our view a smart way forward. Especially considering the cost of failing to implement this approach.
UPDATE, 4/23/09: It should be noted that although the regional HOT lane plan is a major step in the right direction, some healthy debate is warranted over the spending priorities in the MTC's larger, $218 billion, 25-year "Transportation 2035" plan, approved yesterday by the planning body. It's reported that of the $218 billion in anticipated revenues, some $142 billion would be spent on expansion, operations and maintenance of transit; $66 billion for street, road and highway maintenance; and just $11 billion for expansion of roadways. The "Transportation 2035" plan, including amendments approved yesterday, can be found here. Further analysis of this broader 2035 plan will need to be of the gimlet-eyed variety. It should include comprehensive review of costs and benefits of the transit versus roadway expenditures, plus scrutiny of fiscal assumptions and strategies, versus fiscal best practices.
Editor's Note: Cascadia Prospectus is pleased to welcome as a contributor Bern Grush, chief scientist and founder of SkyMeter Corp., who in periodic posts will share insights on road user charging technology and other aspects of surface transportation and system pricing.
Worldwide, the need to toll roads is increasing, whether for sustainable funding, transportation demand management, or emissions management. While this includes the usual toll by segment approach using radio frequency identification (RFID) or dedicated short-wave radio communication (DSRC) many transportation planners are looking to wide-area methods such as Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) in the United States and Time, Distance and Place (TDP) in the EU. This trend will almost inevitably continue, with the end result approaching universal tolling and presumably the abandonment of fuel taxes.
The technology to provide "one road-use meter/one bill" is ready now, and tax policy is now being considered by many transport thought leaders. But methods to migrate from fuel tax with free access to "pay for use" over wide jurisdictions such as states, provinces or countries are less well understood.
This paper will look at the new enabling technology and propose a four-stage approach that can help us migrate from fuel tax plus segment tolling, to uniform network-wide pricing.
Read full paper here. (First presented as "Moving From Road Road Pricing To Network Pricing," at ITS Asia 2009.)
In an op-ed in the Sunday Yakima Herald Republic, the Yakima Valley Fruit Growers-Shippers Association explains why it supports the recommendation by Governor Chris Gregoire, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and King County to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99 with an inland deep-bored tunnel. The state senate has already passed a bill securing $2.4 billion in funding for the project, and the state house last week passed a transportation budget bill providing some of that amount for the tunnel. A house bill specific to the tunnel must still be passed and may be voted on as soon as this week. (The tunnel itself is estimated by the Washington Department of Transportation to cost between $1.2 and $2.2 billion, with about $1.9 billion the most likely amount - see last page here. On top of the $2.4 billion being sought from the state, Seattle, King County and Port of Seattle are to provide the balance for related mobility projects, which coupled with the state funds would bring total project cost to $4.2 billion).
As it happens, the central Seattle waterfront, where the seismically vulnerable Viaduct now stands, is our state's gateway to the world. Association Executive Director Keith Mathews explains why apple growers in Central Washington care about the tunnel proposal.
Consistent, efficient and uninterrupted access to the Port of Seattle (not only for export markets, but other, coastal domestic markets) is absolutely critical to our industry as well as others located on this side of the Cascade Mountains. And SR 99 is a critical link to the port. Since 1959, the Alaskan Way Viaduct has served traffic going to and from the port. In 2001, the 6.8-magnitude Nisqually earthquake shook it and severely damaged it. Though temporary repairs have allowed the viaduct to be reopened, state leaders are now seeking a way to replace it.
Several proposals have been considered, including the use of surface streets and transit only (surface option), replacement with another elevated structure, and the deep-bore tunnel and transit option now under consideration by the Legislature. There are several significant flaws to both the surface-only and elevated options. The surface-only option would eliminate one of only three north-south transportation corridors in the Puget Sound area (i.e. the gateway to the port), thus paving the way for gridlock on those streets, as well as Interstate 5 and I-405. The elevated option would involve tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct and gridlock for up to six years while the replacement structure is built.
On the other hand, the deep-bore tunnel could be built while the reinforced Alaskan Way Viaduct continues to function. This will keep our truckers going to the port and the economic benefits flowing to Central and Eastern Washington. For these reasons, our association believes that the proposed Seattle deep-bore tunnel is the optimal solution in providing a clear access to and from the port via Interstate 90 and other routes. This proposal provides a reconstruction plan that minimizes traffic congestion during construction and provides an efficient travel path to and across SR 99 for years to come.
The association's primary membership is composed of 42 packer-growers who supply half the apples consumed in the United States each year, pumping nearly $2 billlion annually into the state economy and $15 million a week in paychecks for Central Washington workers.
Reuters reports that U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told a senate committee the administration of President Barack Obama will not sign off on any hike in the increasingly ineffective federal gas tax, though Congress may propose that.
LaHood's declaration signaled that the Obama administration will take the same stance as former President George W. Bush. Revenue generated by the tax of 18.4 cents on each gallon of gas sold in the country goes into the Highway Trust Fund to fix U.S. roads and public transit. That fund has already been depleted once and Congress had to pass emergency measures last summer to replenish it. The tax has not been raised since the early 1990s...
The Bush administration also opposed a tax hike and last summer suggested looking beyond taxes to privately run electronic tolling systems and tax incentives for transportation investments. LaHood told the hearing that there are "a number of other things that will help us raise the revenue to satisfy the needs that we want to meet here."
True, the Obama administration's current position on the gas tax does not rule out a modest hike when the economy recovers, but even then and even if indexed to inflation, by-the-gallon fuel levies by the federal government and the states will provide only marginal cash compared to growing system needs fueled by dramatic increases in road usage over the past 50 years, and ongoing U.S. population growth. Additionally, today’s vehicles are much more fuel-efficient, depressing revenue growth, and the “price signal” sent by the gas tax is weak.
Even if the federal gas tax were raised another 10 cents a gallon (about the limit politically), and a state's gas tax raised another five cents or so, what conclusions would the average motorist draw given that pump prices fluctuated more than two dollars per gallon in recent years and are headed toward settling at far higher levels than in decades past? The motorist's obvious quick take is correct: there are a number of factors more influential than how often and how far they drive - including geo-politics, oil supply and demand, and oil company prerogatives - that influence price at the gas pump.
If what we're looking for is to is allocate scarce roadway capacity, use it more efficiently, and broaden adoption of alternatives to peak-hour solo driving, the connection between choices and costs must be far more direct. We need something which unites the choice of driving on roads and highways and bridges, with the hefty costs of operating, maintaining and in some cases, replacing them.
An alternative set of options includes politically-charged strategies such as raising state gas taxes, county sales taxes, or regional vehicle excise taxes. Another, better type of approach is sometimes called “the user pays,” and it's more direct than a fuel tax can ever be. This menu includes:
electronic tolling of new highway express lanes in major metro regions, with higher charges at peak hours and lower charges off-peak (transit and ride-share vehicles go free);
creating a network of such electronic, variably-tolled express lanes on all major highways in populous regions, which would exist side-by-side with more congested free lanes;
Electronic time-variable tolling of all lanes of all major highways in a metro region;
The latter would likely involve mandatory GPS tracking devices on all vehicles by a year certain (either built-in or retrofitted), though other technologies are also being discussed. Strict privacy protections are understood to be crucial.
Lanes managed under electronic time-variable tolling are already in use in a variety of locales, with some eyeing full-on regional systems of these "managed lanes" encompassing a number of major highways and state routes. They typically involve overhead gantries and windshield transponders keyed to prepaid or billed user accounts, although currently, automated cameras snapping pictures of license plates can replace or augment that approach.
Then there is the conversation about so-called "public-private partnerships" in surface transportation, which will surely continue to advance in the U.S. as atomic rhetoric is supplanted by calm and accurate analysis, of their variety and applicability.
In its final, February 2009 report "Paying Our Way," the congressionally-created National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission concluded motor fuel taxes won't get us from here to there. (End of Chapter 4, "Paying By The Gallon: Motor Fuel Taxes".)
...a variety of factors are converging to challenge the preeminence of (motor fuel taxes) as the primary source of surface transportation funding. Due to a combination of travel growth, system deterioration, increasing construction costs, and lack of indexing, fuel tax revenues are becoming increasingly inadequate to meet investment needs. This inadequacy will likely be exacerbated as improved fuel efficiency and alternative fuel vehicles reduce fuel consumption. Moreover, the public's willingness to pay for the required investments through an increase in motor fuel taxes appears to be weak and may be declining...In urban congested areas, it is possible that charging users of the system more directly will not only raise revenues, but also influence driver behavior and lead to reductions in both congestion levels and the investment that is needed.
The real take-away from the nation’s capital is not that we should start laying odds on when the federal gas tax will finally be raised, and by how much, but that “user pays” is the road map to the future.
The National Journal's transportation blog asks what's the proper role, if any, for public-private partnerships? Among the replies from their expert panel, two stand out. Steve Heminger, executive director of the nine-county (Bay Area) Metropolitan Transportation Commission, writes:
The debate about the wisdom of greater private investment in our surface transportation system is almost always contested on theoretical or ideological grounds, and that may be enjoyable for the debaters but it is completely unenlightening for the rest of us. I suggest instead that we try to answer the following practical question: what part of our investment shortfall are PPPs most likely to address? It is probably not deferred maintenance (about 50% of our total shortfall), because there's not much money to be made in that unglamorous activity. It is also probably not many public transit extensions, which tend to require operating subsidy, not generate operating profit. Nor is it new road capacity that may be needed for overall national system connectivity, but may be located in areas with slower population growth (and less income potential).
So, that probably leaves the sweet spot for "greenfield" PPP's in extremely congested, high growth areas, where new highway or freight capacity can not only pay for itself but generate additional income through tolls or other fees to pay back investors. This category of investments is critical to the nation's future economic well-being, but it probably represents less than 20% of our total investment shortfall.
We do not face an "either/or" choice between PPP's and traditional forms of public funding such as gas taxes and municipal debt. We need both of these tools (plus others) if we are to climb out of the huge investment hole we've dug for ourselves. And we need to deploy these funding tools in the right proportions to address the functional and modal investment needs we face.
Another noteworthy response comes from Robert Poole, Director of Transportation Studies for The Reason Foundation. Poole is a leading advocate of transportation P3s, and automated variable-rate tolling to control metro-region traffic congestion. Poole rebuts a new study by the Public Interest Research Group critical of transportation P3s, to make a few essential points about how P3s should be structured to protect the public interest and draw participation from private investors so important metro-region projects that states and regions cannot fully fund on their own can actually get built.
....their report blurs the distinction between leasing existing toll roads (“brownfields”) and creating new toll roads via PPP mechanisms (“greenfields”). Reporting the total amount committed to various PPP projects (including relatively uncontroversial design-build projects), the report says that $21 billion was “paid for 43 highway facilities” between 1994 and 2006. The context and the wording make it appear that 43 existing highways have been long-term leased during this period. In fact, a grand total of four toll roads have been leased in the United States. All the rest of the PPP activity has involved the financing of much-needed new capacity.
PIRG’s report also makes it sound as if most of these projects involved 75 to 99-year leases, such as those involved in the four brownfield projects. In fact, most new PPP toll roads are being developed under 35 to 50-year concessions. And large up-front payments, another PIRG target, are relatively uncommon on the growing number of greenfield projects. Why? Because these projects are challenging to finance solely based on their projected toll revenues. In the event that traffic and revenues turn out to be more than originally forecast, the trend now is to include revenue-sharing provisions in the concession agreements.
....the public-interest recommendations of the PIRG report are either platitudes (“the public should retain control over decisions about transportation planning and management”) or unrealistic. Two examples of the latter: 1) No deal should last longer than 30 years. 2) The legislature must approve each negotiated PPP agreement.
The first would rule out many projects that would pencil out at 40 or 50 years, thereby reducing the scope for the private sector to help close the funding gap. And the second is a proven deal-killer. The few states that have included such a provision in their enabling legislation have received exactly zero proposals. Why? Because the cost and time involved in winning a competition for a billion-dollar project and then negotiating a 300-page concession agreement are too large to be risked on the whim of a legislative vote. The workable approach, which both California and Florida figured out after trying the PIRG way, is to enact legislation spelling out the parameters within which deals can be negotiated, and leaving the details to their state DOT or transportation commission.
When California recently resolved its mammoth budget deficit, it presciently moved to ease restrictions on transportation public-private partnerships, which over the long run could help control costs to taxpayers of improving overloaded roads, rails and freight facilities. P3s, as the arrangements are called, draw from among construction, engineering, highway management firms - plus infrastructure investment groups often funded partly by public employee and building trades union pension funds - to form consortiums that get important transportation projects built more efficiently, and sooner versus later or never. A P3 consortium may provide consolidated services such as designing and building a toll bridge or highway section, and can also provide upfront capital if public funds are constricted, as is so often the case now.
The private consortiums may not only design, build, and help finance these variably-tolled facilities, they may operate and maintain them too, for several decades under a lease agreement with their public partner, such as a state department of transportation. (The latter can retain ownership, control toll rates and enforce contractual performance standards). Over the long haul, the private partners make back their investment and a profit, while the savings to taxpayers over a project's full life cycle accrue, versus going it solely on the public's dime, and solely under public-sector management. P3s can also target transit, and crucial port and rail infrastructure. (Various types of P3 are described here by the Canadian Council For Public-Private Partnerships.)
Many of the P3 projects have a genuine green hue: such as "managed" lanes on highway sections, bridges and tunnels where booth-less electronic tolls are set higher during peak hours and lower off-peak to maintain a steady traffic flow at speeds of 45 to 50 miles per hour while ride-share vehicles and transit go free. Increased telework at home, as well as off-site meetings, remote work centers and para-transit offer additional ways around the higher peak-hour tolls.
The P3 approach is a hot topic, and a tool increasingly being considered by elected officials. In a new report, the Pew Center On The States paints the backdrop:
In 2008, the federal Highway Trust Fund - one of the nation's primary sources of funding for highway renovation and construction - almost went broke. States, hurting from falling revenues of all kinds, including gas tax proceeds, lack the money to meet their own infrastructure needs. These funding problems have turned into a crisis. Every year the numbers worsen. Much-needed highway repairs are being neglected...The current trend is unsustainable. Congestion and pollution will continue to increase, public safety will be compromised, and states' economic growth and ability to attract and retain strong businesses will falter if the nation's transportation system fails to receive the investments it needs. Federal funding - through the stimulus package, a proposed infrastructure bank or both - will help. But the gap remains large, and as a result, state leaders are looking to partner with the private sector.
Burgeoning global population has huge market implications for infrastructure finance. In a new working paper, the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation estimates (p. 5) that through 2030, annual infrastructure requirements for electric transmission and distribution, road and rail transportation, telecommunications and water are likely to average about 3.5 percent of global gross domestic product, or about $2 trillion per year, higher if other kinds of infrastructure are added in. Small wonder new consultancies fluent in P3s are forming. States and nations are coming to the dance, and matchmakers are in demand.
Senate Bill 4 is the game changer in California, signed into law in late February. Under restrictive 2005 pilot project legislation, California had allowed the state transportation department and regional transportation agencies to enter into only four P3 arrangements, total, up until January 1, 2012, two in southern California, two in northern California. Under SB 4, unlimited transportation P3s are allowed between now and January 1, 2017. Jim Christie of Reuters explains:
Billions of dollars of private capital for infrastructure may pile into California with the state, the world's eighth-largest economy, opened to public-private partnerships....Hopes for busy construction sites meeting infrastructure needs across California have been thwarted by increasing strains on traditional financial sources for public works -- taxes, user fees and the municipal debt market.
...Officials responded by clamping down on spending, including for public works. They hope to open the infrastructure spigot when the state resumes market sales of its debt and expect federal stimulus money to help bring projects on line sooner. But California's needs are so vast it could use even more infrastructure dollars -- most obviously for congested roads, a reason for the bill aimed at highway P3s. "The clearest cases for public-private partnerships have always been made for transportation," said (Gov. Arnold) Schwarzenegger adviser David Crane.
Up the road a piece, Washington has unfunded transportation needs of $38 billion (in 2005 dollars) over the next 20 years, according to the state's transportation plan update issued in 2007; that amount is exclusive of local transit needs, says the Washington State Transportation Commission (p. 5, here). The transportation commission in a 2007 report noted that:
A series of key state assessments have urged the P3 approach be more closely considered for major transportation projects. The Expert Review Panel on SR 99 Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement and SR 520 bridge replacement stressed the value of regional tolling and P3s as finance tools, especially for the looming life-safety rebuild of the 520 bridge. The Regional Transportation Commission chaired by former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice and ex-Western Wireless CEO John Stanton recommended serious attention to possible long-term concessions and build-operate agreements with private partners. A report prepared for the legislature's Joint Transportation Committee stressed that P3s can attract new capital otherwise unavailable, accelerate project delivery, and offload government's construction cost overrun risk.
P3s could prove especially helpful in getting built the new bridge across the Columbia River between Clark County, Wash. and Portland, Ore., extending SR 167 from South King County to the Port of Tacoma, constructing the SR 704 "Cross Base Highway" in Pierce County, in making improvements on Interstate 90 at Snoqualmie Pass, upgrading the state ferry system's big Colman Dock terminal in Seattle, and in financing additional ferry terminal, freight rail capacity, and "transloading" projects.
State-issued bonds are required for all projects; that should be changed to allow comparison of alternative financing structures. State bonding timelines should be extended from 30 to 40 years to help finance mega-projects. No fewer than six entities can effectively stop a P3 project; clearer authority should be given to the transportation commission to make final decisions.
To its credit, the state used a design-build P3 approach for the newer, southbound tolled span of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and lately has been exploring P3 possibilities for ferry facilities, and alternative fuel stations in the I-5 corridor. But with as much as $6.6 billion now needed for the SR 520 bridge rebuild, and another $4 billion required to put right I-5 in Seattle and US 2 to the north, plus a slew of other unfunded, important projects (see above), Washington needs to really open up to transportation P3s.
Recent news only underscores the paucity of funding. The Seattle Times reports that the state senate's proposed transportation budget has would delay until 2016 some 31 highway projects that had been planned for sooner (the House proposal slices things a bit differently). At the same time, Sound Transit is warning that its voter-approved $18 billion second phase expansion plan, including light rail across Lake Washington to Bellevue and Redmond, may come up as much as $2.1 billion short due to the recession and declining tax revenues.
Lawmakers admit that by (2016), a combination of declining gas-tax revenue and high bond debt will leave few dollars for new projects. Tolls or other taxes in the 2010s would be needed to keep promises made in the 2000s, when Olympia boosted gas taxes by 14-½ cents a gallon.
After the planned deep-bored tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct (for which the primary pot of state funding is intact), the 520 bridge is the next Puget Sound roads mega-project on the horizon. The Seattle Times reports that the cost could rise to $6.6 billion but the state only has about $1.9 billion exclusive of tolls. The most aggressive tolling scenario identified by a state committee (with the earliest start on the old 520 bridge plus tolls on parallel I-90) would yield another $2.4 billion, for a total of $4.3 billion, which is $2.3 billion less than the priciest and least intrusive option, most favored by influential activists in Seattle neighborhoods at the bridge's west end. (Fine tuning of the state transportation budget could boost dedicated non-toll funds, but a large gap is still a distinct possibility).
Credit has been tight lately, to say the least, dampening near-term enthusiasm for government borrowing, P3s, and activity by infrastructure investment firms. But a slew of recent deals foretell transportation P3s re-gaining traction as the economic recovery gradually unfolds.
In Florida, a Spanish-based consortium, ACS Infrastructure Development, has closed a $1.6 billion-plus deal to design, build, finance, operate and maintain a 10.5-mile reconstructed I-595 connector in Broward County, from near the Fort Lauderdale Airport and I-95, going west to the I-75/Sawgrass Expressway interchange. A central feature, right down the middle, is three reversible, electronic time-variable tolled lanes called 595 Express. Other project components will include improved interchanges, direct connections to the express lanes, ramps and bypasses, a greenway, sound barriers and bus rapid transit in the corridor. By having the private consortium design, build and finance the rehabbed connector and then maintain and operate it for 35 years before ownership reverts to the state, Florida offloads construction cost overrun risk and maintenance and operations costs. The state will lease the center express lanes from the consortium and collect the tolls. If the tolls must be raised at some point in the future, that will be done by the state, not the private consortium.
"This project is a harbinger of what we may be seeing over the next decade or so, as we don't have enough money for major construction," said Robert Poole, director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation, a free-market think tank....The Obama administration has rejected the idea of increasing the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gasoline tax to raise revenue for infrastructure projects. That could lead states to pursue more private-funding options.
In Texas, a private consortium of Cintra, Meridiam and the Dallas Police And Fire Pension System has been chosen as the preferred partners in a $2 billion, 52-year concession to finance, operate and toll new managed lanes on I-635, or the LBJ Expressway. At four lanes in each direction, this 1969-vintage metro Dallas corridor is seriously congested, an "avoid it if you possibly can" route like I-5 through Seattle or Portland. Under the agreement, the private partners will completely rebuild 9.7 miles of I-635 and 3.6 miles of intersecting I-35E. In each direction along the way there will be two frontage lanes, four tax-funded general purpose lanes and three managed lanes to be variably tolled, electronically, at rates meant to attract traffic yet also keep it flowing no slower than 50 mph. If average speeds dip below that mark, sliding scale damages would be paid by the private operators to the state department of transportation. The Dallas Morning News reports that the deal comes amidst plans to develop tolled, managed lanes on all highways in the metroplex. Rush-hour tolls will be steep on the new tolled LBJ lanes, at $7 one way to start; off-peak tolls lower.
Two billion dollars worth of work is to be completed in five years. Four hundred workers will begin laboring full-time at the outset, with as many as 1,500 more added in phases from 140 subcontractors. Cintra, Meridiam and the pension fund will invest $600 million, borrow $500 million from private sources and plan to secure another $500 million in government-backed loans from the Federal Highway Administration. Texas will contribute $445 million.
Some of the money for the Texas projects will come from direct equity stakes held by the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System that should return at least 8.5 percent annually after 10 years, said Richard Tettamant, the fund's administrator. He said the stakes are the first direct P3 infrastructure investments by a U.S. public pension fund, and "we are open to investing in any type of infrastructure ... anywhere." Other pension funds seeking stable returns for long-term obligations may be interested as well, said Joel Moser, lead partner in the infrastructure practice at Fulbright & Jaworski in New York. "We're talking about trillions of dollars in equity that could potentially flow into this sector," he said.
The Dallas fund has 8,500 members, current and retired police and firemen. Cintra expects to hire 2,000 workers for 5 to 6 years for the job.
In another tolling-based P3, construction began last year in Northern Virginia to build 14 miles of "HOT" lanes on the Capital Beltway/I-495. Private partners Fluor-Transurban are investing $349 million and the commonwealth $409 million, supplemented by another $1.1 in toll-backed bonds and loans. Vehicles with three or more passengers will travel free in the new lanes while others will pay variable electronic tolls. Drivers will have the option of free lanes in both directions, though they will be more prone to congestion. The HOT lanes will be owned and overseen by the commonwealth but managed and operated by the private partners. Construction is to be completed in 2013.
Ports are getting in on the action, too. A division of a private infrastructure fund has won approval from the Port of Oakland for a $150 million deal which will give the Port $60 million in the near term and allow the private concern, Ports of America, to invest the remainder in cranes and environmental improvements to complement a 50-year operating agreement for several docks. Six thousand jobs will be created and a second-stage, $350 million deal is being discussed, which would connect the port to more rail lines.
Other major transportation P3s nearing completion in North America include the Sea To Sky Highway from Vancouver to Whistler, British Columbia, and the Canada Line rail extension from Vancouver south to the suburban hub of Richmond, and the region's airport.
Will Washington state's public employees get in on the P3 action? Only if makes good money management sense. The Washington State Investment Board oversees 17 different public employee pension funds and 22 other state funds with combined holdings of $67.6 billion, and would like to increase to at least five percent of its portfolio its "tangible assets" class, which can include timber lands, real estate and infrastructure assets. WSIB Public Affairs Director Liz Mendizabal says the board's first and foremost responsibility to its members is fiduciary. An ongoing performance benchmark is to achieve an eight percent average annual return on investments. Another aim, with the stock market meltdown at top of mind, is to diversify the portfolio further. Mendizabal cautions that while some public employee pension funds may invest directly in a specific transportation project (i.e. Dallas), WSIB is not one of those: it invests in managed funds only. Any WSIB investment in infrastructure would thus have to be through an infrastructure fund.
An additional note: because public employee pension funds already enjoy tax-exempt status on their interest earnings, they are highly unlikely to buy the tax-exempt, lower yield bonds that state governments often issue to fund transportation projects.
The Big Daddy of infrastructure investors among public employee pension funds is the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System. Bloomberg News reports OMERS manages $44 billion ($C) for its 390,000 members, and hopes to increase its infrastructure holdings from 31 to 35 percent of its holdings. North American rail systems are among its targeted areas for new infrastructure investment. The mammoth California Public Employee Retirement System - where former WSIB Executive Director Joe Dear is now Chief Investment Officer - is often mentioned as another potential investor in transportation infrastructure. But the talk has amounted to little so far. That may change with California's new transportation P3 law, though Calpers' members have previously been vigilant and litigious in warning the board off any P3s involving private partners. There are other approaches. A division of a wholly-owned Calpers subsidiary is proposing a sizable P3 investment in the state of Virginia's ports network. Calpers and the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund also are trying to advance a larger federal role in seeding infrastructure P3s. A key element would be a National Infrastructure Investment Bank. Famed financeer Felix Rohatyn helped develop the proposal and continues his advocacy. But Kiplinger Letter Associate Editor Jim Ostroff predicts it's a virtual non-starter.
Also in the political breakdown lane: a national infrastructure bank to fund large, multistate projects....It would be seeded with Uncle Sam's money and chartered to borrow money at ultralow interest rates that only federal entities can obtain. But Washington lawmakers won't cotton to ceding control of several billion dollars of highway money each year to an independent agency.
Which, if proven true, will tend to leave political leadership on transportation P3s at the state level, despite some existing federal programs that can help facilitate these deals, such as U.S. DOT "private activity bonds", and loans through the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA project roster here). In any case, it is states especially that must confront one of the biggest perceptual obstacles to U.S. P3 investment by infrastructure firms: their characterization as "foreign" and "private." In truth they're often as much or more Main Street than Wall Street - drawing capital from building trade and public employee unions, and hiring loads of U.S. workers for big projects such as those in Texas and Florida, in all sorts of categories.
Another objection to managed lanes, which are often at the heart of roadway P3s, is that the higher peak-hour tolls are unfair to lower-income drivers. A study by UCLA and USC researchers is the latest to debunk that contention about so-called "Lexus Lanes" that favor the well-off.
Those who oppose tolls and other forms of road pricing argue that low-income, urban residents will suffer if they must pay to use congested freeways. This contention, however, fails to consider (1) how much low-income residents already pay for transportation in taxes and fees, or (2) how much residents would pay for highway infrastructure under an alternative revenue-generating scheme, such as a sales tax....Low-income drivers as individuals save substantially if they do not have to pay tolls, but as a group low-income residents, on average, pay more out-of-pocket with sales taxes.
So though the debate continues, there's already a brave new world of transportation finance taking shape. In the past, Washington state and regional elected officials have tended to approach planning and financing of transportation mega-projects on a piecemeal basis rather than developing a comprehensive strategy. Now, some - such as State Sen. Ed Murray - clearly get that a systematic approach to tolling regional highways, plus public-private partnerships are needed.
Next year, state lawmakers could begin the process of extending electronic time-variable tolling to major highway corridors in the region (federal approvals are required for Interstate tolling, but the signals are generally green). Regional tolling, new or raised taxes or fees of some sort, and private partnerships will be needed to build and operate vital surface transportation projects in many states, at a time when funding and finance prospects are dimming so precipitously. In a report on the proposed Washington Senate 2009-2011 Transportation Budget, the Senate Transportation Committee somberly warns:
The world is changing. Existing sources of state and national long-term transportation funding are not sustainable. In addition, new car technology and policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have a significant and negative impact on transportation revenues. A concerted effort is needed to merge a new reality with new policies, and bring key stakeholders together to develop and drive the transition.
In a presentation last summer to a gathering of the Pacific Northwest Economic Region, Washington State Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond and WSDOT's Director of Public-Private Partnerships Jeff Doyle shared some important observations:
U.S. public sector motivations for P3s include contractual allocation of risk and price certainty; outsourcing of unpleasant tasks and costs of facility operations and maintenance; creation of new revenue sources, use of innovative financing and the monetizing of existing assets (3rd slide).
In the continuum of P3s, WSDOT sees the state as firmly in the middle, comfortable with approaches going as far as "design-build" contracts which unite those two phases for increased efficiency and savings (such as for the newer southbound span of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge,) but shying away, so far, from more full-on P3s such as design-build-finance-operate-maintain lease arrangements with private partners. (5th slide)
In the U.S., P3s are seen in a more limited function, as an alternative finance mechanism, while "Canada views P3s more holistically" in terms of full life cycle project costs (2nd to last slide, "Conclusions").
Therein lies a telling point. Private debt adds costs to a project more than state-issued debt, but other savings during a project's full life cycle, such as from privately-managed operations and maintenance of a toll road or transit line for several decades, can compensate. Add to that the value of an asset returned to public management in turn-key condition after an operating lease expires, replete with the "12 secret spices" recipe for smooth going from industry-leading experts.
Then there's the real show-stopper: the hefty economic and social benefits of getting something built years sooner - including the associated savings in congestion avoided, business opportunities not lost, and idling vehicle emissions reduced.
All told, P3s can pencil out well. It depends on the project specifics; and how thorough and honest is the calculus.
At least as important in Washington state as freer rein for private partnerships in financing, operating and managing transportation assets, is that such a liberalized P3 policy would signal a new openness to finance innovation in times when system needs far outpace available public resources.
But even vaunted "innovation" is only as good as what it gets. Surface transportation systems emulate smaller entities and organisms. They must adapt and improve, or be eaten.
Columbia River Crossing is the $4.2 billion project to replace two old, crowded and dangerous bridges connecting Washington and Oregon on Interstate 5 (pictured below left, courtesy of KATU-TV Portland). The old structures (one goes northbound-only, the other southbound) are to be supplanted with a new, two-way variably-tolled bridge, that will also extend Portland's light rail system to Vancouver, Wash., add bike and pedestrian pathways across the river, and fix six devilish bridge corridor interchanges near the crossing.
It's been announced recently that the bridge will be 12 lanes total, then the highway will narrow back to six. The wider bridge will be built to help handle crossing volume fed by longer-haul traffic and also by local and regional drivers, a goodly portion of whom may not travel great distances on I-5, but need to access the bridge, from safer new merge and exit lanes, to get between Clark County, Wash. and points south, in Portland and environs. Yet the bridge lane count is prompting considerable worries among some critics that the new facility will encourage more vehicle use, suburban residential development, and greenhouse gas emissions.
Another, but somewhat contradictory argument is that the 12 bridge lanes aren't going to be needed because more and more people will be taking transit - witness the slight increase in transit use nationally last year, and slight drop in vehicle miles travelled.
Let's back up for a quick minute. First, it's great to see more people using public transit. That's been encouraged by the gas price run-up of last year, the faltering economy, and growing concerns about greenhouse gas emissions. Metro region transit systems are in a good position to increase their market share, except that they're now scrambling to make up for sharply declining sales tax revenues which may force cutting routes that carry fewer passengers, at higher costs.
But even assuming transit systems successfully re-tool, and even with a slight drop-off last year in vehicle miles travelled, the nation's roadways are still strained after decades of explosive growth in use, while maintenance lagged. We can all agree - or should - on the need to create more incentives to expand ride-sharing, transit and tele-work. Yet the private vehicle is here to stay and to plan metro region transportation systems based on a hope against hope that auto usage will go into significant decline, is just plain....not smart.
Improving fuel efficiency, and in coming years, mainstream market penetration by electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles will help keep cars in heavy circulation. So too will the current daily realities of the driving life, for people who have pressures of limited time or longer distances to travel, or spread-out daily "trip chains."
There's hope, though, that Columbia River Crossing can be completed in a timely manner while successfully addressing mobility and environmental concerns. Now likely to be deployed on all lanes of the new bridge is electronic time-variable tolling - which rewards carpoolers, van-poolers and transit vehicles with free passage, but charges tolls to solo drivers, on a sliding scale determined by time of day or real-time congestion levels. (Lower tolls when traffic is lighter, off-peak; higher tolls when it's heavier, at peak hours.) Time-variable electronic tolling will help fund the project, and can help produce effective limits on peak-hour solo trips and congestion.
Last week, the CRC Project Sponsors Council approved a "mobility council concept" that paves the way for a high-level advisory body to help direct management of the new, tolled bridge and quite possibly, the parallel I-205 bridge to the east, across the Columbia.
That last part will be important because the two form a natural two-pronged highway corridor running north-south across the river, connecting Washington and Oregon. From the north, I-205 branches off from I-5 in Clark County, Wash., north of Vancouver and about six miles from the river, and then proceeds southeast across the river, parallel to I-5, but some four-plus miles apart from it, to the Oregon side. From there, I-205 connects with key arterial roads, and state routes, running approximately 24 more miles south, and finally back west before it rejoins I-5.
Joined At The Hip With I-5
Serving as a gateway to populous suburbs, plus commercial, business and leisure destinations, and providing an oft-utilized workaround to snarled I-5 in Portland, I-205 is literally joined at the hip to I-5. They can't be considered as anything less than a single corridor - where peak-hour solo driving must be priced and rationed, and transit, ride-sharing and tele-work further encouraged. If one bridge is tolled, but the other isn't, then there's great potential for exponentially more traffic diversions from one to the other. Corridor management is where things are headed in surface transportation, and defining corridors the right way is essential.
Here's the background to last week's action. The "locally preferred alternative" for Columbia River Crossing, set last July, established that the new bridge would replace, not augment the current I-5 bridges; and that design and planning should facilitate use of the bridge by light rail, bus, high-occupancy vehicles and bicycles while also taming "one of the most significant chokepoints" for traffic in the "nationally significant" West Coast trade and commerce corridor.
The mobility council concept agreement approved last week by the Project Sponsors Council represents part of the plan to make those aims reality. The agreement notes some important points of consensus as the project moves through the final phase of the Environmental Impact Statement and into design:
The replacement bridge will be constructed with adequate width to accommodate six lanes in each direction to provide for safe operations between interchanges and efficient movement of people and goods.
This project is consistent with the regional plans that call for three through lanes in each direction on I-5 within the metropolitan area.
The finance plan will include tolling options to not only repay debt and ongoing operations and maintenance, but also to help manage the travel performance of the Columbia River crossings.
The project will create predictable and reliable trip durations for freight and other high priority trips moving through and within the corridor, and help maintain regional trips on the facility, rather than spilling over to local collectors and arterials due to congestion.
At its meeting this coming June, the sponsors council will create a technical group to develop performance measures and initiate public dialog on tolling strategies. This work will serve as at least a partial template for the mobility council, when it sets to work. Once formally seated, it would advise the two state transportation departments and local and regional transit agencies on how best to manage the 1-5 bridge and possibly also the I-205 bridge with tolls and other policies.
While the CRC Project Sponsor Council's mobility council concept does not specifically mention including the I-205 bridge in performance management corridor, a corollary resolution approved a week earlier by the Portland City Council does. The city resolution and an "attachments" backgrounder can be viewed here (click on the magnifying glass icon for each to access the MS-Word documents). The city resolution states, in part:
...the Columbia River Crossing is a project of great importance and unprecedented magnitude in our region, with far-reaching benefits for the city of Portland and the city of Vancouver; and...the physical capacity of a new bridge is inextricably linked to the issue of how it will be managed over time...the City of Portland supports the concept of performance-based management to maximize freight and personal mobility through the I-5 and I-205 Columba River Crossings using performance standards....the City recommends that a new bridge be built to accommodate up to three add/drop lanes and three through lanes in each direction, but that use of these lanes will be actively managed over time to get the right mix of tolling, HOV or HOT lanes, vanpools, and transit fare programs to reduce vehicle miles traveled and pollution...the City of Portland supports the formation of a Columbia River Crossing Mobility Council...
The Mobility Council would have a chairperson jointly appointed by the governors of both states, and one non-elected member serving a three-year term appointed by each of the two state DOTs, the two states, the two cities (Portland, and Vancouver, Wash.), the four designated transit or planning agencies, and the two ports. The two DOTs would provide staff to the Mobility Council, and the council would every year develop a Columbia Crossing Mobility Operations Plan on tolling, transit service, vehicle demand management and related measures, which the two DOTs and two transit agencies would then either accept or reject. Parts of each yearly plan could be rejected with comments, for re-submission. Stalemates would be broken by a meeting of the mobility council's chair with the chairs of both state transportation commissions or both transit agencies. The two DOTs and the transit agencies would retain the right to act without recommendation of the mobility council if deemed necessary, and the DOTs could also raise toll rates at a faster than recommended schedule if needed to satisfy bond obligations, including maintenance and operations costs.
Those seem reasonable caveats. Given the political and economic stakes, it would be mistaken to assume the mobility council would be just another paper tiger. Policy experts and everyday users alike will be watching the corridor closely to see if traffic flow and environmental objectives can be met. One thing is certain. The complex juggling act is one faced by scores of other major metro regions, on the West Coast and across the U.S. And at the root of it all are two clear realizations. Free peak-hour highway lanes for solo drivers carry huge social and economic costs, and failure to develop robust road pricing systems and better mobility choices will hobble surface transportation and the economy.
During his successful campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama embraced the cause of surface transportation, arguing with gusto for improvements to inter-city high speed rail, for research and development to advance the mainstream adoption of alternative fuels, and for other green transportation initiatives. In contrast, his general election opponent John McCain trilled one note on the evils of transportation funding earmarks. To those who follow surface transportation policy, the difference between the two was stark: Obama won big points as the more knowledgeable, engaged, and passionate of the two. McCain appeared to be either out of his depth, disinterested, or constrained by poor political counsel.
Now flash forward to our current and befuzzled times. While a disappointingly scant $50 billion of the $787 billion federal stimulus bill was allocated to transportation, Team Obama seemed again to be warming to transformation when newly-appointed Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood in a wide-ranging recent interview told Joan Lowy of the Associated Press the country needs to take a good hard look at taxing vehicles by the mile, and more regional tolling. The White House brusequely and publicly notified LaHood that in mentioning a mileage tax he had wandered far off the reservation.
That's hardly where the story ends, as I will explain below. But first, just what is this beast, anyway?
The envisioned vehicle miles traveled tax, or VMT, is seen by backers as a better way for drivers on our nation's worn out highways, bridges and roads to pay as they go, resulting in a more sustainable surface transportation system. A VMT is also meant to make choices such as transit, ride-sharing and tele-work more attractive than peak-hour solo driving, while helping to fund those alternatives, too. Why do some believe a VMT is needed? Even if raised, the by-the-gallon federal gas tax will fail to deliver over the long haul, as vehicle fuel efficiency continues to increase. The big federal Highway Trust Fund it feeds is already on last-gasp life support. Meanwhile, VMTs have already been successfully beta-tested in, of all places, Central Puget Sound, and the state of Oregon, which is widely seen as a national leader in evaluating the policy's possibilities.
What about common criticisms of a mileage tax? The answer is to design it well. A VMT can be designed to protect privacy. It can also be calibrated to give discounts to drivers of more fuel efficient vehicles and those who travel during off-peak hours and on less-congested roads.
By 2020, Congress willing, GPS trackers could be built into all new cars sold in the U.S. and added to older ones. Cross-state coordination would be required, as would inter-operability between a federal roads VMT and state or regional tolling systems. Regional systems, in addition to imposing time- or congestion-sensitive electronic tolls on certain bridges and stretches of highways, could - if Congress does not - extend the VMT concept to major arterials or even all streets and roads. Such a bold step is all but unthinkable today, but could help make maintenance of county and local roads and funding of regional transit less dependent on endless ballot measures and special pleadings to the legislature.
To be sure, the costs and benefits of the current versus the new approach would have to be convincingly detailed to win voter approval for anything so radical as a mileage tax on arterial and sub-arterial roads. The political risks would be considerable at the front end, but could diminish sharply over time as turmoil around surface transportation funding eases and user benefits steadily accrue.
For Washington state, a national VMT on federal-aid roads would mean a steady funding source for the $2 billion worth of mostly-orphaned work needed on Interstate 5 between downtown Seattle and Northgate, and for the nearly $2 billion needed to fix fatality-plagued U.S. 2 which runs east from Snohomish County. That same VMT could be divvied up in such a way as to help fund more transit in those corridors, too. A regional or state VMT could provide a steady share of funding for all manner of languishing pavement repair, interchange re-design, Active Traffic Management, Intelligent Transportation Systems and life safety projects on roads, plus high-capacity corridor transit enhancements.
Some politicians intuit the game-changing possibilities. That's why the VMT has been gaining momentum in recent years and months despite predictably visceral reactions from the general public. Recent news reports show the VMT concept being advanced, at various stages and in various ways, in Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Minnesota, Michigan and Massachusetts. The head of Missouri's state transportation department says a VMT is probably inevitable there within several decades. Even Idaho's Republican Governor Butch Otter has voiced support for taxing vehicles by the mile. In Washington, the state transportation commission's 2009 policy platform suggests a closer look at a VMT tested across state lines on the West Coast.
So the VMT's prospects are considerable, though we're only in the early innings of this contest.
Yet no sooner had the mention of a mileage tax escaped Secretary LaHood's lips to Web news sites, than Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs issued a sharp rejoinder, saying a VMT was not, and would not, be a policy of this administration.
A predictable barrage of stories immediately ensued, declaring the mileage tax dead, sunk, history, D.O.A.
But Gibbs' curt smackdown of LaHood was itself quickly overtaken by events.
In an interview with Congressional Quarterly, Oberstar said that LaHood "had the temerity to think...and what did he get? Slapped down. He's a good man. A decent man. Don't let him get slapped down by know-nothings." Oberstar then suggested that Gibbs ought to stay out of the conversation on transportation policy.
"I've got news for you," Oberstar said, "transportation policy isn't going to be written in the press room of the White House."
"Oh, it's on," Tapper concluded with relish.
That it is. For then came the velvet hammer: the issuance last week of a long-awaited final report of the Congressionally-created National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Revenue Financing Commission, titled "Paying Our Way" (executive summary here). An earlier version had already favorably highlighted the VMT option.
In its final report, the commission first noted the troubling backdrop. There's been a doubling of U.S. auto and truck traffic from 1980 to 2006 while growth in highway lane miles was virtually flat and maintenance of roads and bridges lagged. Real spending per highway mile traveled is down by nearly half since the Interstate system was established in the late 1950. Total highway and transit outlays as a percent of gross domestic product is down one-quarter over the same span, to 1.5 percent today. Because it has been unadjusted for inflation, the federal gas tax has lost one-third of its purchasing power since the last time it was hiked, 16 years ago.
The price of inaction is high. With resulting lost time, squandered fuel and vehicle deterioration, congestion in the U.S.'s 437 urban region costs upward of $78 billion annually. The commission reported the feds ought to be providing half of the $200 billion required per year to maintain and improve the nation's highways and transit systems, but that currently all levels of government are generating only one-third the needed funding. The commission took pains to point out - quite properly - that state, regional and local governments must shoulder the burden too, finding new resources to boost capacity and make other improvements.
What to do, then? The 15-member commission in its unanimous report said the gas tax - buried in a per-gallon price that is shaped by other factors - sends poor price signals to motorists, and that a mileage tax would clarify the linkage between driving and the needs of a poorly maintained, underpriced system.
The commission emphasized that a VMT could be calibrated by time of day, type of road, vehicle weight and fuel economy, and could be implemented nationally in 2020 after a decade of thorough research and development, and demonstration programs. To meet the base-case goal of providing sufficient federal funding for maintenance and improvement of highways and transit, the rate would need to be set at about 2.3 cents per mile for cars, if a VMT was charged on all roads. If the charge were restricted to federal-aid roads only, it would need to be somewhat higher, according to the report.
In its report, the commission also pinpointed variable tolling as a key approach at the state and regional levels and identified a slew of effective federal revenue-generating measures complementary to a VMT, such as a tax on auto and truck tire purchases, a 10 cent per gallon hike in the federal gas tax to help meet near-term needs, a 15 cent per gallon hike in the federal diesel fuel tax, and a federal carbon tax.
Major national dailies weighed in thoughtfully after the release of the commission's final report, drawn to the flame of the VMT debate. The Christian Science Monitor editorialized:
Gas taxes - at both the federal and state levels - must inevitably go the way of the gas guzzler. As vehicles become more fuel-efficient, they'll drink less gas, and thus produce less revenue to maintain and improve America's aging roads and mass transit. Add electric cars to the mix, and this revenue stream turns to a trickle.......Financing for transport infrastructure can no longer depend on indirect fees hidden in the overall cost of a gallon of gas but must rely more on direct user fees, such as tolling and congestion pricing.
Gasoline taxes may have sufficed to build the highways of the 20th century, but they've done little to influence vehicle use of roads. Changing behavior is the key to 21st century transport that must unclog crowded highways and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Taxing miles alerts drivers to the real cost of using roads and can better motivate them to drive less....Last week, the US Department of Transportation secretary spoke favorably of the VMT, but the White House press secretary quickly dismissed the idea - odd for an administration interested in innovation.
Members of Congress, which commissioned the panel in the first place, can drive the VMT idea when they reauthorize the surface transport bill, which expires this year. Well they know the fragility of the federal Highway Trust Fund, which last year neared bankruptcy and needed an $8 billion infusion because the gas tax couldn't keep up with repair and improvement needs. A VMT is the more reliable and efficient way to pay for transport. Its time has come.
A mileage tax could be tailored so that Hummer drivers, for example, paid more per mile than Prius owners. The tax could also be levied at higher rates during rush hour or on congested highways, discouraging people from driving at times when they would spend the longest on the road. It's no surprise, then, that groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund have praised the proposal.
Most mileage tax proposals call for a tracking device in vehicles that, according to the commission, would "function like the GPS devices that million of Americans have already installed in their cars without worry of privacy loss." There are potential privacy pitfalls, but, as the commission wrote, "such systems can and should be designed to fully protect travelers' privacy." The trackers could be designed so that the government would only receive information about how much a driver owes, not where the driver has traveled. Reassuringly, a successful mileage tax pilot program in Oregon protected drivers' privacy.
In leaping to quash any further discussion of a mileage tax, Obama spokesman Gibbs was more likely than not doing the bidding of some higher-up adviser wary of blowback from the political Right. But Team Obama's Old School move has had exactly the opposite of its intended effect, as indicated by the reaction from Chairman Oberstar and the national dialog that has ratcheted up following the issuance of commission's final report.
If Oberstar is as serious as he sounds about continued examination of a VMT, the next logical step would be for Congress to include robust funding in the reauthorized surface transportation bill this autumn for several VMT demonstration projects. The I-5 corridor - crowded and worn, but vital to freight and passenger vehicle mobility - is an especially suitable candidate.
As it happens, in April a national symposium on VMTs will be staged by the Texas Transportation Institute. Leaders of the completed Oregon and Puget Sound pilot projects will be among the featured presenters, as will a representative from Germany, where a VMT for heavy trucks has already been instituted. Also scheduled to speak is a representative of U.S. DOT's Federal Highway Administration. Perhaps the White House should send an envoy as well, to listen, and learn.
The newly-signed federal stimulus legislation includes $8 billion for intercity passenger rail projects - preferably high-speed rail in major corridors connecting metro regions. In addition, as reported by The Politico, the Obama administration will seek an additional $5 billion in high-speed rail funding over the next five years.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has designated six main high-speed rail corridors, all of which would link major metro areas. Here's a map. The corridors are: Eugene-Portland-Seattle-Vancouver, B.C.; San Diego-Los Angeles-Bay Area-Sacramento; South Central; Midwest; Southeast; and Northeast (a.k.a. "Keystone-Empire"). The California High Speed Rail Authority, which last fall won voter approval for $10 billion in bonds to help develop its system, has already prepared preliminary plans for how it would spend a requested $2 billion slice of the high-speed rail stimulus pie. The authority's plans include nine "grade separation" crossings, which employ overpasses or underpasses to separate vehicle traffic and train tracks, and thus eliminate the costly delays that result when their pathways cross.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, the existing Amtrak Cascades route between Portland and Seattle (pictured, right) includes extensions south to Eugene and north to Bellingham, Wash. and Vancouver, B.C. Operated by Amtrak in concert with the Washington State Department of Transportation and the Oregon DOT, the route's ridership hit a record high in 2008, up 14 percent from 2007. Travelers like the alternative to slogging on Interstate 5. WSDOT Secretary Paula Hammond says:
"While we suspect high gas prices last summer helped entice people to try Amtrak Cascades, we think the excellent service and convenience for travelers will continue to stimulate even more growth in Amtrak Cascades ridership. Amtrak Cascades is a great investment for Washington and provides motorists with yet another travel option."
A high-quality intercity passenger rail service offers an alternative to automobile and air travel that can help reduce congestion, energy use, and environmental impacts of highways. If the rail system cannot accommodate frequent and reliable intercity passenger rail service, the State risks losing the benefits of passenger rail as an alternative to highway and air travel.
Against that backdrop, the Commission sounded a warning about the I-5 rail corridor which serves the Amtrak Cascades route, plus frequent freight rail operations, and commuter rail. The corridor, said the Commission:
....is subject to frequent stoppages when trains tie up the mainline to enter and exit the many ports, terminals, and industrial yards along the corridor. Some half dozen sections are chronic choke points, causing delays that ripple across the entire Washington State and Pacific Northwest rail system. The pressure on the rail system will increase in the next decades...many more rail lines within Washington State will be operating at or above their practical capacity....As freight and passenger trains compete for time and space on the rail system, the capacity constraints may also frustrate the service and ridership plans for the State’s passenger-rail program....
Among the policy recommendations in the commission's report:
where public benefits are clearly demonstrated by rigorous cost-benefit analysis, the state should invest in preserving and improving freight and passenger rail systems;
additional private investment in the state rail system which benefits the general public should also be sought.
In an interview aired yesterday on KOMO-AM 1000 in Seattle by reporter Travis Mayfield (mp3 file here), Cascadia Center's Bruce Agnew said the Amtrak Cascades route has good prospects for winning a share of the $8 billion high-speed rail stimulus - and that a slice of that pie could improve service frequency, some route infrastructure, and average speed. The Spanish-made Talgo trains can reach 110 miles per hour but currently average closer to 70 mph due to factors including at-grade crossings, other train traffic, and track condition.
The U.S. Senate and House Appropriations Committees will get an outline within 60 days from U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood on criteria for a national competitive grant program for the high-speed rail funds in the stimulus bill. The funds are then to be allocated to winning recipients within another 120 days.
Over the long term, additional funding will be needed to build a separate freight rail track between Seattle and Portland. Nationally, the stimulus money just approved for intercity and high-speed passenger rail will provide important benefits but also underscores the necessity of state and private investment.
A committee hearing is schedule today for a bill (HB2211) introduced in the Washington State House of Representatives to effectively exclude the Interstate 90 bridge from an east-west bridge corridor tolling plan that would help fund replacement of the dangerously windstorm-prone and earthquake-prone parallel State Route 520 Bridge. The bridge replacement is estimated by the state to cost between $4.6 and $6.6 billion, as the Seattle Times has reported. Both the I-90 and SR 520 bridges connect Seattle with major Eastside job centers and will have to shoulder more traffic in coming years as population and employment grow, even if transit and vehicle trip reduction gain market share. Dropping I-90 from the corridor tolling plan is something with which the state treasurer and a key Senate legislator who has introduced a regional corridors bill, beg to differ. More from today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
The Senate measure (SB549) would create a regional transportation corridor authority in King County that, with voter approval, could impose tolls to finance improvements on SR 520...and I-90. It would permit tolling of both Lake Washington bridges, something (sponsor State Sen. Ed) Murray thinks is needed if enough money is to be raised to finance the 520 Bridge alone. He said world experience shows traffic will avoid tolls on a bridge if there's another nontolled route nearby....Murray said the two bridges are really managed together as facilities that both move people and goods across the lake. "They work together, because traffic on one helps traffic on the other," he said. "You can't solve problems on one without the other."
Former State Treasurer Mike Murphy also said both bridges needed to be tolled in order to finance a new 520 Bridge, and once said he wouldn't sell new bridge bonds unless there were tolls on both spans. Murphy's successor, Jim McIntire, hasn't gone that far but is helping lawmakers analyze the consequences of new tolls. Through a spokesman Wednesday, McIntire agreed it "would be very difficult to finance a new (520) Bridge without placing tolls on both I-90 and 520.".....Murray also thinks the tolls could help finance corridor bus service, which is under pressure in King County as supporting sales taxes decline. The county has proposed a car-tab tax to help it support new bus service.
Never mind Everett Dirksen's alleged remark. A billion is real money. The user fees would be well calibrated and reasonable. Final rates must be approved by the state transportation commission, but the committee summarized a variety of scenarios it studied. One-way rates would be $1.05 to $2.75 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.; $1-$2.55 from 7 to 10 p.m.; 0 to 95 cents overnight; and 80 cents to $1.60 on weekends. Bridge passage would carry no toll for transit passengers at any time, or for ride-sharing vehicles of three or more passengers (or perhaps two or more, depending on what legislation is ultimately passed). The real kicker price-wise would be for peak-hour solo drivers, who'd pay $2.15-$4.25 from 5 to 9 a.m. and $2.80-$5.35 from 3-7 p.m. Rates rise as real-time road use does, to keep traffic flowing at 45 mph or more. If a final scenario within the range of those studied by the committee were adopted, then peak-hour solo drivers using the bridges would have to decide if as much as $9.60 a day to guarantee quick passage is worth the cost or not. No costs if ride-sharing, using transit, or tele-working. Lower costs if traveling off-peak.
There's no free ride anymore. The per-gallon gas tax won't be raised much, and isn't buying much anymore, anyhow. User fees are an important piece of the puzzle in surface transportation funding and shouldn't be applied in isolation in a major metro region such as Puget Sound.
King County Metro Reform
Other revenue measures must be considered as well, to help fund transit operators - particularly bus operators, who've been hit by a double-whammy of increased demand but plummeting revenues from sales taxes. At the same time, bus operators, particularly King County Metro, will need to: winnow service aggressively to routes and hours which have the highest percentage of seats filled; seriously consider far stiffer fare hikes than recently announced; focus more on express routes rather than "milk run" locals; and develop a plan to fund important amenities which improve the rider experience, such as mandatory pre-boarding pay kiosks, dual ground-level entries/exits, and on-board wireless Internet service (for a premium monthly fee). Last the region checked, in 2006, scheduled transit's share of daily trips was four percent (second paragraph of p. ES-6, here). That figure likely rose in the last two years but service funding difficulties now threaten continued gains in transit market share. Despite the current tight economy, we'd better figure ways to help our region's varied bus fleet operators adapt and improve for the long term. That must go hand in hand with funding crucial corridor management and infrastructure replacement plans that include time-variable electronic tolling.
Earlier this month, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and King County Executive Ron Sims announced an historic accord to replace the seismically vulnerable Alaskan Way Viaduct on SR 99 along the downtown Seattle waterfront with an inland deep bored tunnel. (The last page of this state summary provides details on all project components and planned funding - the tunnel is expected to cost between $1.2 and $2.2 billion). State legislative approval is required. Now, Washington State Senate Majority Caucus Chair Ed Murray, State Senate Transportation Committee Chair Mary Margaret Haugen (pictured, right), the committee's Ranking Minority Member Dan Swecker, and committee member Fred Jarrett of Mercer Island have introduced Senate Bill 5768 to get the tunnel built. The bill will soon get a committee hearing, and if it clears the full Senate will require passage by the House and final approval by the Governor.
Several other legislators have already gone so far as to publish blog posts expressing their support for the Gregoire-Nickels-Sims tunnel plan. They include State Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles and State Rep. Reuven Carlyle, State Sen. Joe McDermott, and State Rep. Ross Hunter. More on the tunnel's supporters - and one very important potential backer - in Olympia from C.R. Douglas in today's Crosscut. Members of the King County Council and Seattle City Council and a broad coalition of business, labor, neighborhood and some environmental groups also back the tunnel plan. The current Senate bill could be amended in either chamber, of course, but as introduced it would:
expedite environmental review and design of a four-lane, stacked deep bored (inland) tunnel which according to state plans would run under First Avenue from near the sports stadiums in Sodo about two miles north to near Denny Way;
approve disbursement of the already secured $2.4 billion in state gas tax and related funds for Viaduct replacement;
require generation of at least $400 million in tunnel funding through tolling the facility;
limit the use of that combined $2.8 billion to building the tunnel and demolishing the Viaduct, with replacing the downtown seawall and creating a waterfront promenade to be funded from non-state sources;
assign to the City of Seattle the costs of public utility relocation stemming from viaduct replacement and tunnel construction;
direct the Washington Department of Transportation to prepare by January 2010 a report to the legislature analyzing the revenue potential of tolling the tunnel, the impact of tolling on tunnel performance, and scenarios to offset or reduce traffic diversion onto other routes caused by tolling the tunnel.
One possible scenario, tolling parallel Interstate 5 through central Seattle, would help minimize diversion, raising additional revenues toward the $2 billion in needed I-5 work identified by WSDOT, and establishing the concept of north-south corridor tolling in west-central Puget Sound. In terms of an evolving regional policy, this could dovetail with a pending option to establish east-west corridor tolling on the State Route 520 and Interstate 90 floating bridges connecting Seattle and the booming Eastside, across Lake Washington.
Tolling of some sort is all but certain to be approved by the legislature on at least the SR 520 bridge as a condition of a federal grant to help fund a multi-billion replacement of the wind- and earthquake-prone structure.
A special SR 520 tolling implementation committee created by the legislature yesterday issued its final report to lawmakers. The committee found broad public support for time-variable electronic tolling on the SR 520 bridge and majority support in the region for such tolling on the I-90 bridge as well. According to the report there is potential to raise as much as $2.4 billion for the SR 520 bridge replacement through tolling both bridges. That's approximately 40 to 50 percent of the total bridge replacement cost.
The report also notes that peak-hour tolling on the SR 520 bridge could improve average speeds from the current 20 miles per hour to 38 mph. Improved peak-hour speeds on the SR 520 bridge are predicted because, given time-variable tolling, an estimated 24 percent of drivers would then either shift to less costly off-peak periods (six percent), transit (three percent), ride-sharing (one percent) - or they would change routes (nine percent spread over three alternates), or destination (five percent).
The projected aggregate shift away of one-quarter of peak-hour drivers following implementation of time-variable tolling on the SR 520 bridge is significant. So are the three-quarters of peak-hour bridge drivers who would not alter their patterns. We cannot wish or hector them into their homes, buses, or ride-share vehicles, nor force their employers to expand tele-work policies.
But further change can be induced through funding increased peak-hour transit frequency in key highway corridors with a full-on system of tolled express lanes, using express buses augmented with pre-boarding automatic pay stations, ground-level entrances and exits, real-time arrival information kiosks, and on-board WiFi connections to the Internet. That last part will prove a huge draw, prompting employers concerned with productivity and costs to more easily see their way to subsidizing large numbers of yearly transit passes for workers.
Accompanying all this must be performance-based measures of improved transit travel times and better inter-modal connectivity, especially for "last mile" travel to work or commercial hubs.
Tele-work will need to grow through employer education, expanded government-funded pilot programs to measure benefits, and perhaps then modest tax incentives.
Another objective is continued development of on-the-fly ride-sharing facilitated by networked communications, one of several big ideas discussed by Microsoft's Chief Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard (TVW video with full transcript at page's bottom, here) during our Cascadia Center's jam-packed September, 2008 "Transforming Transportation" conference in Redmond.
The key conclusions from the SR 520 committee's report are that to manage peak-hour traffic congestion, scarce highway capacity should be rationally allocated through time-variable tolling; and that policy-makers must continue their important efforts - including electronic time-variable tolling - to ensure travelers can select from a robust menu of mobility choices. This pertains not only to Central Puget Sound, but also to heavily-travelled highway corridors in Clark County, Wash./metro Portland, and Spokane .
The unfolding actions to toll the SR 520/I-90 bridge corridor; and to toll the SR 99 tunnel, perhaps ultimately paired with central Seattle I-5 tolling; present a golden opportunity for the state legislature and Gov. Gregoire to continue carving their own broader environmental and economic legacy in 21st Century surface transportation.
The much-hyped federal economic stimulus package isn't looking like it will do all that much for surface transportation. The New York Times reports that the House stimulus bill contains a scant $30 billion for roads and bridges and $10 billion for transit. Turns out most of the infrastructure spending in the bill is not for surface transportation. The new administration has weighed in, supporting the bill. Washington State would get $530 million for highways, roads and bridges and $216 million for transit from the bill, according to D.C. correspondent Les Blumenthal. To put that in context, we have about $38 billion in unmet transportation funding needs, as shown on p. 5 of this overview from the Washington State Transportation Commission.
On the way to final passage, the federal stimulus bill's funding level for surface transportation nationwide could be tweaked somewhat, with more coming to our state and others. But not a lot more. As the Wall Street Journal reports, among House members the hoped-for level of surface and air transportation combined spending in the stimulus bill topped out at $85 billion, and a key committee chairman was eyeing a more achievable $53 billion. The $85 billion (including air transport) would be less than one-quarter of the estimated annual nut to address national surface transportation needs for each of the next 50 years (air transport not included). Even assuming that best-case, one-time $85 billion jolt, plus an envisioned federal infrastructure investment bank and the surface transportation bill re-authorization this coming autumn, the gap between what states need and what the feds can supply will be vast in coming decades.
It's true that a proposed U.S. infrastructure bank could raise some $60 billion over 10 years for deserving projects. That'd be a start, but as Congressional Quarterly reports, the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission in a major report issued (in 2008) said $225 billion per annum is needed for the next 50 years for repairs and upgrades to meet future needs. That's $12.5 trillion. The commission noted that current expenditures are less than 40 percent of their recommended yearly nut, and that future funding will need to be closely tied to cost-benefit analyses and performance-based outcomes.....The commission's scarifying estimate dovetails, roughly, with one by the American Society of Civil Engineers that just to get moving on vital projects, the nation's infrastructure needs an infusion of $1.6 trillion over the next five years.
As you'll see toward the bottom of this recent report from the Houston Chronicle, the Congressional Budget Office projects the federal highway fund will run out of money by this year's end, likewise the federal transit fund by 2012. An increase in the federal gas tax is seen by some as partial remedy, but with government and consumers moving steadily toward ever more fuel-efficient vehicles, this by-the-gallon tax will have a diminishing yield even if the huge political barriers to raising it can be surmounted.
Which brings us to the multi-faceted Cod Liver Oil Solution. One part is exploration of a vehicle-miles travelled tax, certain to bring out the musket-bearers in the near term, but probably one key element - here and elsewhere - in the long term. Another piece, already taking shape, is networks of time-variable tolled lanes in metro regions. The Bay Area is among a number of regions nationwide beginning to roll out that strategy; it is distinct there from a smaller and more controversial initiative to impose a pricing cordon around the central city aimed at individual drivers. Arguing in the journal Mass High Tech that regional time-variable electronic tolling systems are smarter than hitching our wagon to the dying gas tax is Craig Carlson, director of Cambridge Consultants. These "fast lanes" raise maintenance and operations funds directly from users - but even more importantly, help control peak hour use by solo drivers while transit and ride-share vehicles go free. If you're still skeptical, at the New York Times' "Freakonomics" blog UCLA researcher Eric Morris explains why free highway lanes recall the Soviet food lines of yore.
Similar perspectives are beginning to take root in The Evergreen State, in practice and in theory.
One important indicator of where the thinking on best practices is heading comes from our state transportation commission, which recently unveiled its 2009 policy platform. Scroll down to "priority policy issues." Among the key recommendations for legislators to consider are further development of regional tolling, and - take a deep breath - a West Coast pilot project to test out a vehicle-miles-travelled tax. The commission, whose statutory duty is to advise the legislature on transportation and to approve toll rates, is also keen on a carbon tax structure for the state and eventually nation, which rewards greener vehicles. Some of their policy priorities, in their words:
A Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) based system in which drivers pay for the miles they drive with per-mile rates varying according to location, time of day, and day of week is a technically feasible approach. However, it appears doubtful that one state can implement such a system on its own. While there are serious political challenges with such a concept in the short term, the topic is gaining interest nationwide and is actively being discussed in Washington, D.C. One possible approach ...would be to implement a federally funded pilot VMT-based project on the West Coast - perhaps an I-5 “Corridor of the Future” project. This idea is advocated by the West Coast Transportation Commissions.
Tolling and congestion pricing should be applied over time where appropriate, to transportation facilities as identified in the Commission’s 2006 Tolling Study. (Parts 1 and 2 here). Pricing has been proven to be an effective means to manage congestion, maximize the efficient use of scarce transportation resources, and reducing VMT which carries climate change benefits. Tolling has these effects in virtually all cases in which demand out-paces capacity, including both highways and ferries. Indeed, the recent experience in the United States with relatively high gas prices began to demonstrate the impact of pricing on personal transportation decisions. We must act now to move critical tolling projects forward.
Consider imposing a state carbon tax structure based upon vehicle type. Ordinarily this concept would be a long term notion in this country and in Washington State. However, such taxes are being implemented in other parts of the world and should be acted upon in the near future in this state and nation.
The commission also urges a closer look at strategies including these:
Increase vehicle registration fees.
Reinstitute some form of a value-based vehicle “excise tax” with a reasonable depreciation schedule.
Explore, using cost-benefit analysis, public/private partnership investments in delivering capital construction projects and how such investments can be employed to help shape our economic and environmental future around sustainable mobility.
The commission discusses a range of additional strategies highlighting environmental concerns and the crucial role of transit. Legislators will need to ensure that some judicious share of new road revenues is directed to transit in major metro regions, so that better alternatives exist for those who'd like to sidestep expanded road pricing when their schedules permit.
Drawing on the transportation commission's 2009 policy priorities, Washington state legislators and Governor Chris Gregoire can help pave the way for a new breed of revenue solutions to our long-neglected and growing surface transportation needs. These solutions in turn can help meet - and disperse - the future transportation funding obligations of a state now badly overextended, while simultaneously fueling our economic engine.
In an interview with Ross Reynolds on KUOW-FM - MP3 audio file here - Washington Governor Chris Gregoire said it was "very likely" that tolling would be applied to the new deep bored tunnel planned to replace the seismically vulnerable Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99 in Seattle. (A state rendering of the bored tunnel's cross-section is below, right.) At the 3:02 mark, she states:
It's very likely that we will toll. Any mega-project that we do today is having to be tolled because historically we had so much federal money coming in (but) we no longer do...
"There has to be tolling. In any megaproject there is going to have to be tolling...There is no other way to move forward on megaprojects if we don't."
That's an on-target assessment, consistent with the strong support the Governor, some legislators, and the state transportation department have already shown for tolling current and planned projects. Electronic time-variable tolling is on the legislature's agenda this session to help fund replacement of the wind- and earthquake-prone State Route 520 floating bridge across Lake Washington, and that plan could include tolling of the parallel Interstate 90 bridge. A federal Urban Partnerships grant of $138 million for the 520 bridge replacement, with millions more attached for regional transit projects, is conditioned on legislative approval by September 30, 2009 of tolling the bridge.
A recent poll by the state's 520 Tolling Implementation Committee showed significant public support for time-variable electronic tolling on the SR 520 and I-90 bridges, and for starting tolling on the old 520 bridge in 2010. For polling results, see p. 17 of the committee's Draft Tolling Report to the state legislature, released last week).
Electronic time-variable tolling is already underway on State Route 167 in south King County, and electronic and booth tolling are in place on the new southbound span of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. And the governor has helped build support for electronic tolling on the planned new I-5 span across the Columbia River connecting Washington and Oregon, as a funding and peak-hour traffic management tool.
So, electronic tolling, and time-variable tolls, are on their way to gaining a foothold in Central Puget Sound, and in a major bi-state bridge project. And that approach for the deep bored tunnel on SR 99 makes sense - in terms of funding and public policy. The expected cost of the single bored, 54-feet diameter, two level tunnel to go deep under Seattle's First Avenue for two miles is currently pegged at $1.9 billion by the Washington Department of Transportation, though it could be less in the end. (The 14th slide in this WSDOT presentation of 12/16/08 indicated the cost for the single-bored SR 99 inland bypass tunnel could be as low as $961 million. More clarity on costs for all project elements will develop as engineering progresses.)
But for now, additional transit and infrastructure projects for the key north-south travel corridor bring the total package's estimated cost to $4.25 billion. The City of Seattle, King County and Port of Seattle are slated to supply the balance of funding beyond the state's $2.8 billion, pledged by the legislature for Viaduct replacement work. (More in this WSDOT deep bored tunnel project overview - the p. 3 chart details who intends to pay for what).
However, $400 million of that $2.8 billion was shifted to the SR 520 bridge replacement project by lawmakers impatient with this second-time-around Viaduct replacement decision process. It could be yanked back to SR 99, but the crucial, costly SR 520 endeavor needs all the help it can get. Unless the money turns up in a turnip patch somewhere, or is re-allocated to SR 99, the state's $400 million funding gap for Viaduct replacement on SR 99 needs to be filled. It's a real concern to some State Senate Democrats, as the Tacoma News Tribune's Joe Turner reports. Electronic time-variable tolling of the deep bored tunnel, with transit and ride-share vehicles traveling free, will help close the gap. On his blog, State Rep. Ross Hunter, an Eastside Democrat, says he likes the tunnel as long as it's tolled, and really gets built.
Under any circumstances, tolling the tunnel is a smart move policy-wise. In a concession to cost constraints and environmental concerns, it will only be four lanes, not the current six of the Viaduct. But with added transit service (including an up to 25 percent countywide increase in King County Metro bus hours funded by a 1 percent car license tab tax), a four-lane tunnel can prove workable, especially if there are toll pricing incentives to discourage overcrowding during morning and evening rush hours. Usually, it is only at those times and before and after professional sporting events at the First Avenue stadiums that the Viaduct comes anywhere near capacity.
But would tolling the SR 99 tunnel simply divert traffic to parallel Interstate 5?
Not likely. Even with improvements to I-5, SR 99 will retain a strong logistical advantage for many drivers.
Roughly two-thirds of the Viaduct's 110,000 daily vehicle trips are thru traffic bypassing the downtown core, and SR 99's location west of I-5 makes it a natural choice for many drivers in Seattle and points north and south of the city.
Whereas I-5 is now synonymous with congestion through Seattle, SR 99 enjoys a reputation as a breezy alternative. A reduction from three to two lanes in each direction should not alter that, especially if - as noted above - the tunnel is tolled to discourage peak-hour congestion.
Still, there are some access issues causing discomfort, particularly for local truck drivers going to and and from the Ballard, Magnolia and Interbay neighborhoods of Seattle. Under the current tunnel plan they would lose on- and off-ramp access to and from more convenient, west-side routes where northbound SR 99 bends east from Elliott Bay to an inland alignment. Additional entrance and exit ramps to the tunnel to address these concerns are seen at present as too costly, so a surface street route may be necessary for these vehicles (that could change, as talks regarding a tunnel spur to the northwest are ongoing). And unlike the Viaduct, this tunnel will not permit trucks bearing hazardous materials. More here from the Puget Sound Business Journal.
Everybody, including advocates of a six-lane tunnel, gets to give some blood. There's no way a project of this nature can ever win acclaim from all quarters as a perfect solution, but the tunnel's overall benefits to the region will be huge. It will maintain a crucial downtown bypass alternative to jammed I-5, while encouraging options other than solo driving. It will minimize disruptions to waterfront businesses during construction, versus a new elevated structure at water's edge, which would necessitate awkward detours during years of construction while the old Viaduct is torn down. It will open up the downtown waterfront for more recreation, development and commerce, adding huge increments in property values, which in turn will help finance the project and fatten tax coffers for years to come. And it will last twice as long as any new elevated roadway.
Electronic time-variable tolling makes sense not only to manage traffic flows and help fund the new tunnel, but also on some lanes of I-5 in Seattle from downtown to Northgate. This would contribute to $2 billion in badly-needed I-5 work; and help achieve a regional policy overlay on highways and major state routes of tolled lanes with free passage at all times for transit and ride-share vehicles; and for solo drivers, peak-hour premiums paired with off-peak discounts. This in turn would help drive further adoption of transit, ride-sharing and tele-work. But note: That transit piece depends on continued maintenance and expansion of transit services, such as that enabled by the Metro funding in the larger tunnel package.
In embracing the deep bore tunnel Governor Gregoire, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, King County Executive Ron Sims and Port of Seattle CEO Tay Yoshitani (all pictured above, left) - were spurred by an informed and savvy Viaduct Stakeholders Advisory Committee - and have come together in what is for the Puget Sound region a near-historical political accord on a major infrastructure project.
The tunnel choice is a 100-year masterstroke, and time will prove that out. But let's not develop tunnel vision. A more pressing challenge, which aligns with the green transportation agenda, is breaking away from the piecemeal approach to road and bridge projects, in favor of a consistent regional road pricing strategy for private single-occupancy vehicles. One day that could mean a vehicle-miles-travelled tax on all roads and streets, with off-peak discounts. For now the region and the legislature should adopt a variable-rate tolling policy for some lanes on all highways and major state routes in Central Puget Sound, to alter for the greater good the ways and times we travel here.
Because mere exhortations to solo drivers to "do the right thing," aren't enough.
Though the details are far from settled, a federal economic stimulus package of roughly $600 billion to $800 billion has strong support from President-elect Barack Obama. Congress, including the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrat caucus, is bound to register concern over more borrowing. Still, something will pass and everyone will be grabbing for their share. As much as $300 billion of the stimulus could be set aside for infrastructure, primarily surface transportation.
Hammered by declining tax revenues tied to the economic downturn, plus tight credit markets and growing transportation infrastructure needs, states are feeling needy, and many are voicing great hopes for stimulus package aid.
But the stimulus money has to be spent wisely; and regions and states will have to pitch in themselves, using innovative approaches to transportation finance and funding (about which more at our conclusion, below). Whether the stimulus provides $250 billion, $300 billion, or $350 billion for infrastructure, spread across the nation, it will only go so far. Looking at surface transportation alone - not including other essential infrastructure such as utilities - many major metro regions and states have priority project needs running well into the tens of billions.
The first step, securing congressional approval of the stimulus package and ensuring a hefty share for infrastructure, is vital. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured at right, with friend) explains, in Newsweek:
Our infrastructure is more than just a quality-of-life issue. It is an economic issue. Americans waste billions of dollars while semi-trucks carry goods on gridlocked roads and lose millions of gallons of water in leaky old pipes. We lose time and dollars because our ports are not computerized or modern enough to meet today's demands. Our businesses lose real dollars because our buildings are not energy efficient. This kind of waste raises the costs of everything from clothing to cars to raw carrots. It's clear that the faster we can move people and goods, the stronger our economy is. In short, we are a dinosaur economy trying to compete in a space-age global environment.
...why do we sit bumper to bumper on the freeway for two or three hours in order to get home from work during rush hour?...why do Americans stand in long security lines at the airport, in our socks, just to sit in the terminal for hours as our flights get delayed because of overcrowded airport runways?...we still rely on trains that go the same speed as they did 100 years ago, so our shipping times and commutes are longer than other countries....
...when you think about America's aging infrastructure, we're going to get beat...by our competitors China, India, Europe and Brazil. Travel overseas and you see faster commuter trains, better public transportation, double-decker freeways, and more efficient ports. Meanwhile, infrastructure spending as a share of gross domestic product in the United States has dropped 25 percent over the past 20 years. So, government spending is at an all-time high, while investment in our critical infrastructure is at a historic low. Recession or no recession, our nation desperately needs to update infrastructure that lags behind that of even some developing countries. But it is also true that a recession is the perfect time to put money into long-term investments like massive public-works projects because it creates jobs while pumping up our economy.
Tell it, Guvernator. But how can Congress ensure that the stimulus money for infrastructure - and other purposes - is spent wisely? Some useful guidelines are offered by a national group called America 2050, which tracks land use, climate change, demography, trade and infrastructure, with a focus on emerging U.S. mega-regions. The organization is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the William Penn Foundation, and others. Civic, business, environmental and transportation leaders convened by America 2050 say:
...it cannot be spending as usual. A new approach is needed that establishes a new level of accountability, transparency, and economic and environmental performance for how this country invests in infrastructure projects.
All well and good. States should adopt similar guidelines. Washington D.C. may even figure out some new ways to boost surface transportation spending after the stimulus package is passed, such as this autumn when the surface transportation spending bill has to be re-authorized. Yet in the end states and regions will bear the lion's share of the burden in coming decades for funding surface transportation systems and boosting alternatives to solo driving. That means they will need to move more aggressively on:
regionwide electronic, time-variable tolling;
laying the groundwork for taxing vehicle miles travelled, with off-peak discounts;
investment by public employee and trade union pension funds, and private infrastructure funds in projects which will yield a steady stream of revenues;
"alliance contracting" with performance incentives for teams which design, build, operate and maintain surface transportation facilities - so project delivery schedules can be compressed, quality assured, and costs controlled;
developing better incentives and capabilities for tele-work and ridesharing;
better marrying scheduled public transit with para-transit provided by public and private operators.
In metro regions up and down the West Coast Corridor including Puget Sound these future-facing approaches are vital to regional mobility and accessibility and will require an unprecedented degree of cooperation between city and suburban mayors, state and federal legislators, community, labor, environmental and business interests.
That in turn will necessitate a resurgence of the old-fashioned kind of leadership, one which is less concerned with getting re-elected and pleasing everybody than with getting done what needs to get done.
One of the best ways to get around metropolitan regions without a car....is on the water. And you need not own a boat yourself. In the San Francisco Bay Area, there's an extensive network of passenger-only ferries - they carry people, but not cars. The Bay Area Water Emergency Transit Authority promotes a combined 14 commuter and leisure routes, and is considering more. WETA was created in 2004 to consolidate several long-standing passenger-only ferry routes in the Bay Area, and coordinate emergency response for all. As the "emergency" in the agency's name implies, one focus is being prepared to deploy foot ferries to connect people and places in case of a natural disaster such as an earthquake, or a terrorist attack. Either could decommission roads, bridges and highways. But WETA's main charge is boosting regional daily water transit.
To update the Bay Area's foot ferry fleet, the agency recently took delivery of a new, $8.8 million, 149-passenger twin-hulled catamaran constructed by Nichols Brothers Boat Builders of Freeland, Washington - on Whidbey Island, right here in our very own Puget Sound. The company has built 41 similar vessels since 1982 but the latest iteration is state of the art, as the South Whidbey Island Record reports. Nichols Brothers is already building a second model for WETA, one of three more boats the agency has ordered to date and expects to have running this year.
WETA hopes to have 10 new boats operating by 2025. Fleet expansion and replacement takes foresight and finance. As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, the new vessels are financed by a one-dollar hike in Bay Area bridge tolls which was implemented at the beginning of 2007. The Gemini, which also carries up to 34 bicycles, will initially run between San Francisco and the East Bay.
Meanwhile, the other foot ferry agency in the Bay Area, which also operates the Golden Gate bridge (above at left), has bought for $4 million two late-90s vintage high speed passenger-only vessels from Washington State Ferries. The boats will run between San Francisco, and Larkspur and Sausalito. They were used on the Bremerton-Seattle passenger-only route, which was discontinued because of lawsuits from waterfront homeowners in narrow Rich Passage who contended the voluminous wakes from the boats caused shoreline erosion. That is not expected to be an issue in the more open waters of the Bay Area.
WSF, which continues to operate a badly aging and fiscally-strapped system of car ferries, gradually got out of the foot ferry business (it also operated the Vashon Island-Seattle route) after passage of I-695 in 1999 cut car license tab fees used for funding.
Foot ferries remain in Puget Sound, though. King County has created a foot ferry district - funded by a portion of the property tax - to operate the Vashon-Seattle route, the West Seattle Water Taxi and several demonstration routes which could become permanent, depending on ridership. Bremerton and Kitsap County will test a new low-wake high-speed foot ferry on the Bremerton-Seattle route. The Port of Kingston plans a Kingston-Seattle route. San Juan and Whatcom counties are exploring a Friday Harbor-Bellingham run. Securing full funding is still an issue in each of these last three instances, and shoreline impact challenges remain pressing for Bremerton-Seattle, as Kitsap Transit's Executive Director Dick Hayes writes in the Kitsap Sun.
Compared to the unified approach of the Bay Area, the future for Western Washington foot ferries looks pretty uncertain, and pronouncedly ad hoc. But some sort of unifying regional agreement with additional funding provisions is worth further discussion. This approach could better allow current and future operators to develop - to some degree - shared facilities, equipment, promotion, and management.
In metro Vancouver, British Columbia, a company named Coast Mountain Bus operates, for the regional transit agency TransLink, the SeaBus passenger-only ferry service. Two double-ended 400-passenger catamarans run across scenic Burrard Inlet (one is pictured above) from Waterfront Station in downtown Vancouver to Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver, a community connected to Vancouver and the mainland by the local road and bridge network. Trip time is 12 minutes. A variety of direct transit connections are available at both ends - a bus network in North Vancouver including routes to Grouse Mountain (pictured below) and the Capilano Suspension Bridge; and at Waterfront Station, direct connections to light rail, commuter rail and buses. Two boats, the Burrard Otter and the Burrard Beaver, ply the route. But they are each 30 years old and require maintenance often enough for TransLink to purchase a new third boat to keep schedules on track during repairs and then expand service frequency in 2010.
On the whole, the Vancouver region's foot ferry service, and particularly the Bay Area's, provide an example for Puget Sound. Here, our extensive water highway is used by plenty of lumbering, aged car ferries but precious few of the more nimble passenger-only vessels which encourage broader multi-modal transit use, walking and cycling, and can provide crucial emergency transportation.
The new year is shaping up as the most eventful period in the history of the federal transportation program since the enactment of the Interstate Highway Program more than 50 years ago. 2009 promises "transformational change," to use a currently fashionable phrase. It will be the year in which the transportation sector may expect the injection of an unprecedented sum of money in the form of an economic stimulus. It also will be the year in which the administration of President-elect Barack Obama, a new team at US DOT, and a heavily Democratic Congress will be putting their own stamp on a new multi-year transportation authorization. Lastly, it will be the year in which the federal transportation program is expected to undergo fundamental reform to respond to the changing needs and circumstances of the 21st century.
One key development is the long-awaited report of the congressionally chartered National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission which is about to be released later this month. What follows is a brief summary of the Commission’s findings, based on the open record of the Commission’s public meetings, supplemented by interviews and informal conversations with individual Commissioners. We believe that no significant changes will occur in its key conclusions as presented below.
Multi-pronged Approach
The Commission has concluded that the current federal surface transportation funding structure is unable to generate sufficient revenues to support the country’s future transportation needs. Hence, the nation must begin to shift to a more sustainable system that is able to raise substantially greater revenues. A search for alternative funding mechanisms has led the Commission to focus on the potential of direct user charges, and particularly on a charge system based on vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT). Such a funding framework is consistent with the Commission’s guiding principle that users and direct beneficiaries should bear the full cost and pay more directly for the services they use.
However, a transition to a VMT-based charge system cannot occur overnight, and the immediate needs are simply too critical to wait. Therefore, the Commission will recommend a two-phased approach. To accommodate transportation infrastructure needs in the near and intermediate term (i.e. possibly over the next two authorization cycles), the Commission will recommend a program of incentives to help states and local governments finance infrastructure investments through tolling and other user fees. To enable the federal government to meet its share of capital funding (currently this share amounts to about 40-45 percent of total national system-wide infrastructure investment), the Commission recommends a one-time increase of 10 cents/gallon in the federal gasoline tax and a 15-cent increase in the federal diesel tax, both taxes to be indexed for inflation. In the long term, as the nation converts to a VMT-based charge system, the federal fuel taxes should be progressively phased out. Because of the complexity inherent in transitioning from the current system to a VMT-based system (both institutionally and technologically), the Commission believes the transition process must begin immediately.
State & Local Incentives Program
State and local governments have always been major partners in the funding of transportation infrastructure. In recent times, they have contributed nearly 60 percent toward the funding of highway and transit infrastructure. To enhance their future ability to invest in infrastructure, the Commission will recommend a number of incentives aimed at facilitating the use of tolling and other direct user charges. Specifically, Congress should (1) allow tolling of new highway capacity and of existing Interstate highway capacity in large metropolitan areas; (2) continue and expand the Interstate Highway Reconstruction & Rehabilitation Program which allows tolling of existing Interstates for the purpose of reconstruction and rehabilitation (currently the program is limited to only three projects); (3) authorize pre-feasibility assistance for toll projects and "gap financing" for projects that cannot be fully supported through toll financing alone; (4) reauthorize the existing federal credit (TIFIA) program at a higher annual volume of credit support than currently allowed; and (5) continue and expand the Private Activity Bond (PAB) Program. In addition, the Commission will offer certain observations and make certain recommendations as to how Congress should consider proposals to create a National Infrastructure Bank (NIB). Some Commissioners think the incentives program is a key to getting states and localities to embrace tolling and invest in transportation infrastructure.
Private Sector Financial Participation
The Commission wishes to encourage private sector financial participation where such participation is necessary to get projects to move forward or where it can improve project cost effectiveness and accelerate project delivery. The Commission believes that appropriate governmental controls should be put in place to protect the public interest. Appropriate provisions should be enacted to govern concession arrangements for new toll facilities ("greenfield" projects) and for long-term leases of existing transportation assets ("brownfield" projects).
Federal Fuel Tax Increase
To fund the near-term federal capital contribution to transportation infrastructure investment, the Commission will recommend a one-time 10-cent increase in the federal gas tax and a 15-cent increase in the federal diesel tax (neither of which has been increased since 1993). All future fuel taxes should be indexed for inflation. Part of the proposed diesel tax increase should be dedicated to freight-related investments. The Commission estimates that the proposed tax increases would generate an additional $20 billion per year to the Highway Trust Fund. (This would still leave a $10 billion annual shortfall, assuming a $66 billion annual budget for surface transportation as proposed by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.)
Transition to a VMT-based Charge System
The Commission will recommend that Congress define a clear roadmap for a transition to a VMT charge system as part of the next reauthorization of the federal surface transportation program. The Commission also will recommend a comprehensive program of technology development, pilot test programs and standards development to support the transition to a mileage-based user fee system. Lastly, the Commission will recommen that Congress and the U.S. Department of Transportation should initiate and support extensive public outreach to raise awareness and understanding of the need for a shift to a VMT-based charge system. Public support will be essential to a successful transition to a new funding system.
Analysis
Only time will tell how influential the Commission’s thinking will be in shaping and reforming the federal transportation program, and what impact the Commission’s report will have on future legislation. Our own sense is that the Commission’s report will confirm and add authority to the already widely held notion that the current fuel tax-based system must eventually be replaced with a more robust charge system based on vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT). We also think that the Commission’s support of tolling and public-private partnerships will add legitimacy to these concepts and strengthen the states' resolve to expand their use. We hope that the Commission’s proposed program of incentives for tolling and other direct user fees will be embraced by Congress and the Obama administration and contribute to mainstreaming these measures and realizing their full potential as both a source of revenue and a tool of congestion management. As for the Commission’s recommendation for an increase in the federal gas tax, we reserve our judgment. Looming over this recommendation is the almost certain prospect of a massive economic stimulus bill, a sizeable portion of which is expected to be dedicated to infrastructure (a recent proposal by a group of governors would devote $350 billion to infrastructure investments out of a total stimulus package of $675-775 billion or more). Such a huge injection of capital over two years would be bound to affect the need for and the politics of a federal gas tax increase in ways that cannot yet be fully assessed.
An editorial tonight online at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer praises the smart decision by Washington Governor Chris Gregoire, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and King County Executive to take a harder look at an inland deep bore tunnel to replace the worn out Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99 in downtown Seattle.
Could this be the Year of the Tunnel for Seattle? An idea that seemed buried could make a decisive comeback. After being left off a list of two final possibilities for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a waterfront tunnel survived the end of 2008. On Tuesday, Gov. Chris Gregoire, King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels postponed a final decision on a long-term replacement, which they had promised by Dec. 31.
Even on an already-protracted decision-making process, this is a healthy delay. Assuming that a choice can be agreed to within weeks, it's much more important to make a good call than an immediate one. We are glad that Gregoire appears to be looking closely at all the relevant numbers: costs, how to apportion them and how traffic will move....strong arguments for some inclusion of a tunnel option clearly got the governor's attention.
...At this point, a surface-transit option certainly deserves first place. It's the most reasonably priced. Unlike a viaduct and a tunnel, voters haven't rejected a surface plan. But the current tunnel idea, involving deep boring, is quite different from what Seattle voters turned down in early 2007. Gregoire seems to be interested in the advancing technology for boring, which has been used by Sound Transit. Tunnel backers at the well-versed Cascadia Center say costs would be lower than the state estimates.
Tolling and city contributions could help hold down costs. With the economy in the tank, a big state project might be a good idea. Perhaps federal help would be available. Gregoire, Sims and Nickels need to make a good decision based on solid numbers. That will get 2009 off to a good start.
KOMO 4 TV aired a story tonight (user-friendly Flash video link and transcript here) also highlighting the growing momentum for the deep bore inland tunnel option.
Washington Governor Chris Gregoire yesterday announced she'd push back by two weeks a recommendation on how to best replace the aging, earthquake-prone Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99 along Seattle's downtown waterfront. But there's more. A top Gregoire advisor tells the Seattle Times that the deep bored tunnel proposal - energetically advanced by Viaduct Stakeholders Advisory Committee members plus our Cascadia Center and the general public - is "probably the most viable option." Deep bore tunneling technology has advanced greatly in recent years and the method is considered highly suitable for an inland downtown tunnel away from Seattle's waterfront. (A tunnel boring machine used for Madrid's M30 roadway project is pictured below, right.) The Times:
OLYMPIA - A proposed tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct is making a comeback. A key adviser to Gov. Christine Gregoire said Tuesday that replacing the viaduct with a deep-bored tunnel "is probably the most viable option" - if the numbers pencil out. The comments came after Gregoire, King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels issued a joint statement saying they would miss today's deadline for deciding how to replace the viaduct and needed more time to study the options. They now expect to make a decision sometime in January, according to the Governor's Office. The reason for the delay? "The interest in the tunnel has led us to take some additional time to study it right," said Ron Judd, a senior adviser to the governor and her lead negotiator on the viaduct.....
Judd said transportation planners will be crunching numbers and talking to international tunnel experts to see if a tunnel is feasible now. "I think the governor would say that if we could make the numbers work, that is probably the most viable option," Judd said. "But that option is going to mean that there has to be a real meaningful partnership with the city and county and Port [of Seattle] to make it happen."
Gov. Gregoire's administration, the Washington Department of Transportation, the project team and SAC members are all to be commended for pursuing an optimal solution for the region and the economy which includes a deep-bored, inland, downtown bypass tunnel on SR 99.
A useful template for the detailed discussions which will continue next week is the state's own breakdown of the costs for either a twin-bored or single-bored tunnel. This WSDOT slide briefing presented to the Puget Sound Regional Council, SAC members and other interested parties on Dec. 16 shows:
A single bored, dual level tunnel could be 54 feet in diameter, with two 12-foot lanes in each direction, and an eight-foot and four-foot shoulder in each direction (see the 9th slide in the above link, they are not numbered).
Tunnel components are defined as work on city streets and at entrance ramps, construction of south and north portals, construction of the tunnel, utilities work at portals, and tunnel systems. Broader "scenario components" for the tunnel include downtown seawall replacement, an Alaskan Way and Western Avenue "couplet" boulevard system, waterfront utilities, surface street improvements, Viaduct removal, transit enhancements, and Interstate 5 improvements (13th slide).
"Tunnel only" costs for building a (two mile long) twin bore tunnel would be $1.24 billion, versus $961 million for the above described single bore version; (14th slide);
Those estimates grow to $2.82 billion and $2.13 billion, respectively, when WSDOT factors in contract and construction management, administration, preliminary and final design, contingency risk, and potential cost escalation (15th slide).
Addition of the above-described "scenario components" raises the figures to $3.5 billion for a double-bore tunnel and $2.8 billion for a single-bore tunnel (15th slide).
Adding in another $1.1 billion in already planned "Moving Forward" projects for improvements to SR 99 at the north and south ends of the existing, elevated Viaduct and elsewhere brings the total to $4.6 billion for the double-bored tunnel and $3.9 billion for the double-bored tunnel (15th slide).
So, to report that the tunnel is estimated to cost $3.5 billion, or $4.6 billion, leaves out a lot.
The state has $1.3 to $1.7 billion left to spend on Viaduct replacement at present. However, additional funds can be raised from:
a local improvement district funded by property owners whose values rise due to the project;
tolling the tunnel (and parallel I-5);
and quite possibly from the Port of Seattle and City of Seattle, which both have a vital stake in regional mobility and access.
The tunnel-only estimates ($1.2 B for double bored and $961M for single bored) can both be paid for within the current budget.
Risk factors can be firmly controlled with a stringent competitive bid process tied to innovative "alliance contracting" recommended by the Washington State Transportation Commission. Under this approach, design and construction can be coordinated by a contractor consortium which is paid in full only if strict performance measures are met, including an accelerated construction schedule and project completion deadline.
In addition, the downward turn in the global economy has resulted in a sharp drop in the cost of construction materials. Contractors are hungrier, as well. This reduces the cost overrun risk, especially if material and labor costs are locked in at something close to current value. Industry-leading professionals could be brought in to manage the project, with pay incentives for cost control.
Discussions in the coming weeks, before the Governor makes a formal proposal to the legislature for Viaduct replacement, are likely to include not only additional funding and financing strategies, but also cost control strategies, refinements of project scope, and a fleshed-out set of next steps. Many or at least some of the "scenario components" could arguably be left out. Even if not, the single-bore version, with the highest assumed level of administrative, design and risk costs, plus all "scenario components," is estimated by WSDOT to cost $2.8 billion, against $1.3 to $1.7 billion in current funds.
As noted above, that gap could absolutely be closed through tolling and a local improvement district, at no added cost to the state. Participants underscored such an approach earlier this month, as reported in The Seattle Times.
The legislature will make the final decision, during a session in which priorities will also include taming the state budget deficit and authorizing time-variable electronic tolling to help pay for replacement of the unsafe SR 520 floating bridge. You could say the stars are aligned.
Excitement over the looming federal stimulus package aside, each of the nation's 50 state governments will be necessarily embracing a "pay as you go" ethic to help ensure high-priority programs and facilities are maintained and built in these trying economic times. In surface transportation especially, the heavy lifting next year and in coming decades will have to be at the regional level.
In terms of congestion management, jobs stimulus, durability, life-span, seismic safety, air quality, and urban design and environmental amenities, the deep bore tunnel option trumps another elevated viaduct or a massive dumping of traffic on surface streets. A full life cycle cost-benefit analysis is the responsible approach.
We've only got one chance. Let's get this one right.
A real consensus is emerging. Last night at the final Stakeholders Advisory Committee meeting on replacement of the earthquake-prone Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99 along Seattle's downtown waterfront, Seattle Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis and a top aide to King County Executive Ron Sims joined the near-unanimous majority in voicing clear support for more detailed study of the deep bore tunnel alternative in combination with surface and transit improvements. Meeting notes here.
To minimize traffic and business disruption, the viaduct would stand until tunnel completion, and tolling the tunnel would close the funding gap. Tunnel boring technology has advanced greatly, as detailed a year ago at a Cascadia Center expert symposium on the topic. The downtown waterfront would be opened up, not blockaded with traffic or another elevated viaduct. Superior life cycle costs and seismic safety are other advantages of a deep bore tunnel. Credit for advancing the emerging compromise solution - still subject to legislative approval and a clear and workable finance plan - is due to all SAC members.
SAC members Vlad Oustimovitch of West Seattle and Tayloe Washburn of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce detail the argument for the "surface-subsurface hybrid" in today's Puget Sound Business Journal. Thanks to the SAC, the project team, and important research from deep bore tunnel experts convened by Cascadia Center, the message of the tunnel's viability is being heard at the highest levels, regionally. Governor Chris Gregoire is examining the tunnel option. She, Mayor Nickels and Executive Sims will make a recommendation to the legislature by mid-January, perhaps by late December, on a Viaduct replacement.
When the state evaluated eight options for replacing the viaduct, the deep-bore tunnel was the most expensive, at $3.5 billion. But since then questions have arisen about that cost estimate. The Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center, a nonprofit that explores transportation issues in the region, continues to push for a bored-tunnel option - just inland from the Elliott Bay shoreline, which would keep the viaduct in place during construction. The institute has lined up tunneling executives to argue that improvements in technology have made tunnel boring more efficient and that a bored tunnel could be built for much less than the state estimate.
....The Legislature has set aside $2.8 billion for a viaduct replacement. "We're not asking the state to spend one more cent," Washburn said. He said other financing options should be explored, such as regional tolling and a local-improvement district. "This is a 100-year investment, and we've got to get it right. We, the region, need to take ownership with a funding package to pay for the bored tunnel." Washburn said those who would benefit from a viaduct-free waterfront should help pay for a tunnel.
Dave Freiboth, with the King County Labor Council, agreed. "Any notion of going to the Legislature to ask for more than $2.8 billion is in a dream world. That's not in the cards and shouldn't be in the cards," he said. Seattle City Councilwoman Jan Drago said the region is capable of paying for a deep-bore tunnel. The City Council officially supports the surface option, only because the tunnel was considered too expensive. "We have the available tools and authority (to build a tunnel)," Drago said. The region should explore tolling on all area freeways, she said, creating a transportation-benefit district that could collect viaduct-replacement money, a special motor-vehicle excise tax for the tunnel, and a local-improvement district. "I'm very optimistic," Drago said. "What's new here is the region picking up the funding." The state said it will decide by the end of the year which option to select for viaduct replacement. But it's unlikely support for the tunnel option will disappear when that decision is made.
President-elect Barack Obama Friday is to name retiring Illinois Congressman Ray LaHood the next U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary. Though he has served on the House Transportation Committee, moderate Republican LaHood's upside is his well established role as a bipartisan diplomat with close ties to Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, as the Chicago Tribune reports. He'll need to use well the relationships he's built in seven congressional terms. The surface transportation landscape poses big challenges and real opportunities for establishing a new way of doing business. This article about LaHood's appointment, from the New York Times, highlights several important menu items.
Mr. LaHood...has overseen major spending projects as a member of the House Appropriations Committee....The next transportation secretary will face several challenges. One is that the gasoline tax, regarded since the Eisenhower administration as a user fee to pay for building highways, is no longer reliable or sufficient. Gas at $4 a gallon stunted sales and tax revenue, and the Congress had to come to the rescue of the Highway Trust Fund with $8 billion.
With a growing number of hybrid cars, use of tax-exempt ethanol and the possibility of plug-in hybrids, gasoline consumption is becoming disconnected from highway use. When the bill to re-authorize the Transportation Department is considered by Congress in 2009, there will be proposals for a variety of replacement financing methods, including tolls that vary by time of day, possibly using transponders like those now provided by E-ZPass and similar systems. Another open question is the status of rail transportation, both passenger and freight. Many freight lines are now operating at capacity. And Amtrak, strongly backed by Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and spoken of favorably by Mr. Obama, needs cash for new equipment.
All along, Cascadia Center has been advocating for time-variable electronic tolling, as well as plug-in electric hybrids and increased inter-city passenger and freight rail capacity, as well as new ways of funding surface transportation. It's going to be an eventful, exciting time. But even with federal stimulus spending on infrastructure, states that are tens of billions short for roads, bridges, and transit, will have to raise the lion's share of funds at the regional level. Against a backdrop of region-wide time-variable electronic tolling on highways and major state routes, that means more and more emphasis on complementary funding tools such as transportation benefit districts, local improvement districts, performance-based "alliance contracting" and investment by public employee union and building trades union pension funds. Over the long term, impetus will grow for a mileage-based tax on vehicles, with discounts for off-peak travel.
In ways yet to be fully determined, Congress must help pave the way for this new era. The gas tax - for which prospects of a large hike are politically nil - will have an increasingly ancillary role in transportation funding. Many key players at the federal level either realize that already, or will soon.
OK, another hot flash from your (currently) ''All Viaduct All The Time" news channel. Venerable Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel Connelly writes for tomorrow's edition (online tonight), "What's Needed Is A Third Option For The Viaduct."
The view here is we are not yet ready to swallow, and could gag on either viaduct option. What's needed is tough, honest analysis of a third option, the combination of a deep-bored tunnel and surface transit. Speed is one factor: Could a tunnel get dug and be open for traffic before demolition of the existing Alaskan Way Viaduct? The city has to avoid, at all costs, the kind of prolonged mess that disrupted and degraded Third Avenue when the bus tunnel was built. The Transportation Department's planners seem to have taken a deep dislike to the deep-bored tunnel option. We've heard sky-high estimates on the cost of going underground.
By contrast, experts consulted by The Cascadia Center of the Discovery Institute have filled my e-mail box with analyses that an inland tunnel option would cost $1.7 billion at most. Don't know who's right. We need a analysis by a neutral team of experts.
Our decision-makers should consult Washington's congressional delegation on whether a tunnel replacement of an earthquake-vulnerable viaduct fits President-elect Barack Obama's definition of infrastructure repair. We could have a ready-to-go candidate for federal dollars. All this requires, in Royer-speak, a little more chewing. But, it a) spares us political gridlock in the Legislature; b)helps us steer clear of clawing in the courtrooms; c) potentially gives us a fast through route for freight and auto traffic; and d) ensures us a waterfront that's not an Aurora Avenue-by-the-sea.
Advocates of the deep-bored tunnel option to replace the seismically vulnerable Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99 along downtown Seattle's waterfront, including business and neighborhood interests, rightly stress that the Viaduct serves some 110,000 daily vehicle trips and that the majority of that is "thru" traffic that neither starts nor finishes in downtown. According to p. AWV-5 of this report on the Viaduct, from Washington Governor Chris Gregoire, 60 percent of those 110,000 daily vehicle trips on SR 99 in the project area use the Viaduct as a route through, not to or from, downtown Seattle. This is crucial because if the Viaduct's six total lanes are replaced with surface boulevards including 20-plus traffic signals, plus more transit and an added lane in each direction on the shoulder of Interstate 5 for several miles, Viaduct thru traffic will nonetheless spill onto surface streets and I-5 and worsen congestion severely. More and more so as Puget Sound's population grows by half again in the next 30 years, and total vehicle miles travelled in Washington State rise a projected 54 percent from 2007 to 2030.
Thus the argument, in part, for a deep-bored tunnel which could handle the SR 99 traffic load without obstructing the waterfront like either the envisioned wide, heavily-used boulevards or another elevated viaduct. These are the two options currently recommended for further study.
Some non-governmental advocates of the surface-transit option to replace the Viaduct have been saying that "only 15 percent of the trips are regional trips." This can be misleading if it is understood to refer to SR 99's thru traffic bypassing downtown Seattle, because that is not the case. As this Washington State Department of Transportation document shows (p. 4), 85 percent of person trips through Center City (essentially the downtown Seattle core plus several adjacent neighborhoods) begin or end within a somewhat larger zone known as the "study area," including North and South Seattle. These person trips are on a wide range of streets and roads, on transit and in vehicles, and could be described as more local than regional. Fifteen percent of these person trips don't begin or end in the study area, and are thus considered longer-range, or more regional in nature.
That's all nice to know, and certainly of some use for transportation planning - along with such tidbits as the four percent market-share of scheduled transit for daily trips in the region, last any survey was done (see 2nd paragraph of p. E-6 here). But we're looking at tearing down a crucial portion of a specific state highway that carries 110,000 vehicle trips a day, 60 percent of which are thru traffic bypassing downtown entirely. Sixty percent of 110,000 is 66,000 vehicles a day.
There's a better way. The deep-bored downtown bypass inland tunnel can be built for
$2 billion or less. Nonetheless, to safeguard taxpayers from possible financial risk, a method strongly recommended for greater use by the Washington State Transportation Commission (see p. 9 here) should be employed. This is so-called “alliance contracting,” in which highly competitive bidding delivers a stringent agreement between the public sector and a private consortium of contractors, who must perform project design and construction for a set price within a given timeline or suffer reduced payments.
Facility operations and maintenance can also be included in such an agreement, which is then termed a “DBOM” or “design-build-operate-maintain” project. British Columbia has used DBOM or related approaches successfully to control costs on several new infrastructure projects including a new rail line to the Vancouver airport, a tolled bridge across the Fraser River in metro Vancouver, and the rebuilt Sea-To-Sky Highway connecting Vancouver and Whistler.
Cost controls are one thing, capital is another. If additional financing beyond the remaining $1.7 billion in public monies is determined to be necessary to build the deep-bored bypass tunnel on SR 99, then several approaches should be considered. One is formation of a local improvement district (LID) where property owners who benefit from the project can approve a special levy. A similar approach is formation of a transportation benefit district (TBD) in which a $20 per vehicle license tab renewal fee surcharge can be levied without a vote and a higher amount with a public vote. In either case, electronic tolling of the tunnel could be integrated into the finance plan.
Another strategy that is likely to be viewed as daunting but which holds real promise, is investment from public employee union or building trade union pension funds, provided adoption of a north-south corridor tolling plan covering I-5 and SR 99 in Seattle. With respect to additional financing, we should heed the stated intention of the Washington State Investment Board, which manages numerous state employee pension funds, to invest 5 percent of its substantial capital in infrastructure projects. Jurisdictions across the U.S. are beginning to grasp what Europe, Canada and Australia have long realized: in some instances, innovative approaches to infrastructure contracting and financing are essential to getting road and transit projects built on time and on budget, and built sooner rather than later or not at all.
There is every reason for Washington State to take a leadership role here, not only on SR 99, but also urgently needed improvements to SR 520, I-5, SR 167, SR 705, SR 509, and US 2. Whether through LIDs, TBDs or union pension funds - and while deploying cost-control best practices - Washington State can and must move forward on major roadway projects required for public safety and improved mobility.
Cascadia Center commends the Viaduct project team and the state for all their hard work to date, and hopes that the ongoing dialog around further consideration of the deep-bored tunnel proves fruitful.
Since the recommendation came Thursday Dec. 11 from Washington State Department of Transportation, King County and Seattle officials that the wobbly Alaskan Way Viaduct through downtown Seattle on State Route 99 should be replaced with either a surface boulevard system and more transit, or another elevated roadway, the reaction has been remarkable.
Remarkable because of how much support is being voiced for an option planners have essentially rejected for now, a deep-bored tunnel. Let's survey some of the blowback, which is only likely to grow. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's editorial board today writes:
...several troubling questions have arisen. Does a new, elevated structure really deserve to be one of just two finalists, with its massive commitment to autos and prospect of sealing the city off from its waterfront for perhaps the entire 21st century? For the surface option's waterfront boulevards, why do planners envision stoplights at virtually every block? Can even the most technologically advanced traffic signal synchronization system keep traffic flowing through all those intersections?
Most important, why have government officials tried to eliminate any longer-range option for eventually drilling a deep-bore tunnel should the surface plan wind up quickly overwhelmed by traffic growth? With boring technology advancing significantly, costs may be less than anticipated. And financing mechanisms, such as a regional tolling system, may change the feasibility of a tunnel for the better in the not-too-distant future, if not immediately.
A year-long review of ultimately eight semi-finalist options - conducted with advice of a special Stakeholders Advisory Committee (SAC) - preceded Thursday's winnowing. Next comes a recommendation from Governor Chris Gregoire, King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, before the legislature makes the final choice in its Winter 2009 session.
The rebuilt viaduct option has been deemed unacceptable by both downtown and environmental interests, and the surface solution is unacceptable to both the business community as well as all of the commuters that depend on the Viaduct to get to their jobs....Neither of the two options offer a solution that will garner support from a broad base of constituents, and will undoubtedly once again lead us into acrimonious debate, dividing the region and stalemating the process.
...we all recognize that the most important thing is to maintain our ability to get around....We need to maintain our transportation capacity. The bored tunnel, although slightly more costly than a rebuild is a good investment.
Under the (surface-transit option) if you leave West Seattle and drive through downtown going to north Seattle you will encounter 28 stop lights, a 90 degree turn to proceed through the Battery Street tunnel and a 30 mile per hour speed limit...I am not convinced that another elevated option will solve our transportation needs 50-plus years into the future. This is our opportunity to make Seattle a world class city with a world class waterfront. Building another elevated structure running along the waterfront does not help to accomplish that.
I lean toward the hybrid (tunnel and surface-transit) solution that has been brought forward by the Seattle Chamber of Commerce...I also encouraged the Executives to give a much stronger look at the deep bored tunnel option.....I am not convinced that the cost estimates have been thoroughly vetted and are somewhat exaggerated in materials that we were presented.
..a new Viaduct would represent the worst throwback to poor design in the history of the city and qualify Seattle for architectural booby-prizes for years to come. Such short sighted, single-purpose transportation thinking would consign the harborfront to blight and economic stagnation. After literally three decades of criticism of the present Viaduct, the region would inexcusably replicate the error for our posterity....the all-surface option will fare little better....As mitigation, there are some good ways proposed to improve traffic flow on downtown streets and expand transit use. A new lane squeezed out of I-5 would help, and is needed anyhow. But there is no reason to think such mitigation would begin to suffice in soaking up the existing (SR) 99 traffic flow. It would be an ironic environmental “improvement” that resulted in more clogged, polluting traffic tie-ups on the waterfront.
Even before an all-surface outcome is tested in practice, City, County and State will have agitated the already restive business, trade, and labor communities that consider politicians to be insensitive to what is required to make trade and commerce work on a waterfront. And - just to rev up the lawsuit and initiative process with real passion - the many Seattle area people who merely want to get through the downtown bottleneck as quickly as possible are going to be indignant over the prospect of start and stop, cheek by jowl traffic along Alaska Way.
The fallout is clear. Leading business and labor organizations, as well as international tunneling experts based in Puget Sound and neighborhood leaders, are voicing support for the deep-bore tunnel option, coupled with deep concerns that last Thursday's recommendations are inimical to mobility, commerce and quality of life.
A sentiment to "just do something soon" does not alone make for good public policy. Especially not when a region's economy and the usability of a city's downtown waterfront are at stake. The sooner that business and the neighborhoods can be made to feel that their interests are truly being addressed, the sooner a replacement for the Viaduct can actually be built.
The last time anyone hazarded a report, it was estimated that a whopping four percent of daily trips in Puget Sound occurred on transit (second paragraph of p. E-6, here). That was in 2006. Let's say that percentage has now more than doubled to ten percent. You'd still have nine out of every ten daily trips, occurring in vehicles - versus scheduled transit. Beating traffic congestion in the real world, that's how leaders need to lead sometimes. Like now. With an historic decision for Puget Sound and Washington State partly unfolding later today on finalist options for replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99, an apropos reminder comes from our neighbor to the south, in Oregon. Editorial writer Rick Attig of The Oregonian is encouraged by improved odds for getting the "whole enchilada" version of the new variably-tolled bridge with light rail and a bike-pedestrian path built across the Columbia River, connecting Portland with booming Clark County, Wash. And, he notes:
Until recently, too much of the bridge debate has centered on issues such as whether speeding up commuter traffic would lead to more sprawl and development in the Vancouver area. There's been precious little public discussion about the enormous economic benefits of removing a chokehold from the region's transportation system, or the associated environmental benefits from ending the daily idling of thousands of cars and trucks on I-5.
Ka-ching, and Hello, Puget Sound. If decision-makers fall prey to the extreme social engineering impulse and decide to tear down the Viaduct portion of SR 99 - which carries 110,000 vehicle trips per day - without restoring adequate thru traffic capacity via a deep-bored tunnel, then as a result traffic downtown and on nearby, parallel Interstate 5 will grind to a halt. Tunnel experts say the deep-bored option is affordable, and the best choice by far. The Viaduct decision needs to be part of a broader regional plan for time-variable tolling. To boost transit use, the tunnel could be routed under Third Avenue downtown and a transit station could connect by escalator to the existing downtown transit tunnel which serves buses, and starting next year, Sound Transit light rail.
A compromise option combining elements of the "surface" solution and a tolled deep-bored tunnel is also on the table, along with an array of surface, tunnel and elevated Viaduct replacement options. We'll see later today whether wise heads prevail, or not.
You don't have to be in Seattle long to hear about the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Hugging the coastline, the aging structure carries north-south traffic through the city. It's been the topic of debate for what seems like an eternity. Why? Because it has to come down or mother nature may take it down.
By the time the clock reaches midnight on New Year’s Eve, Governor Gregoire, King County Executive Sims and Mayor Nickels will have on their desks a list of final options for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct. They'll make their decision in 2009.
Cascadia Center is at the heart of the debate and has long advocated construction of a deep-bored tunnel to carry traffic under the city.
Click below to see Cascadia's most recent release and links to supplemental material.
Thursday, transportation officials from the State of Washington, King County and the City of Seattle are to choose two or three finalist options from a field of eight or nine, for replacement of the seismically vulnerable Alaskan Way Viaduct on Seattle's downtown waterfront. Things are moving fast and furious and there is growing momentum for the deep-bored tunnel option - which compared to a new elevated viaduct or added surface street traffic would best minimize traffic congestion and environmental impacts, and open up the most public space on the waterfront.
With some 110,000 vehicles traveling the elevated roadway on State Route 99 every day, and the bulk of that traffic bypassing downtown, simply expanding surface street capacity and adding transit would result in unfathomable traffic jams on the city's waterfront and nearby Interstate 5. Leading business and labor groups have already urged decision-makers to keep tunnel options in play as the process advances.
Yesterday, a half dozen deep-bore tunnel industry experts sent a letter to the Viaduct Stakeholders Advisory Committee explaining how current official estimates overstate the costs of a deep-bored tunnel. Last night at a meeting of the SAC, a ninth option was presented by Tayloe Washburn of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, a "surface-sub-surface hybrid" proposal that backers say could be a "grand compromise."
Meanwhile, the region's leading news radio station, KOMO 1000 AM, has continued to air the latest. Here's a link to some of the segments about the tunnel option's viability that have been airing yesterday and today from morning drive straight through evening drive. One from the top of the 2 p.m. hour today sums things up well.
ANCHOR: "A deep-bore tunnel may NOT be dead...Turns out there's growing support among stakeholders for that option and with good reason. KOMO's Travis Mayfield reports."
REPORTER: "New research has surfaced."
BRUCE AGNEW, CASCADIA CENTER: "We have a letter from tunnel experts that have studied it, and they think the tunnel can be built for somewhere around $1.5 billion, instead of the figure that the consultant team used."
REPORTER: "Bruce Agnew with the Cascadia Center says a deep bore tunnel could be built while the current viaduct remained open...the surface options and the rebuild options would both mean closure for at least 2 years. Thursday the nine options under consideration are expected to be narrowed to two or three, the governor should make a final decision by early next year. Travis Mayfield, KOMO 1000 News Radio."
Then the state legislature, which convenes in January, will make the final decision.
The Viaduct decision is regional and needs to be evaluated as part of where Puget Sound is, and is going, in surface transportation. Transit is growing in popularity and that is something we can all commend. But the vast majority of daily trips will continue to occur in vehicles and so a regional, time-variable electronic tolling system is essential to rationally price peak-hour capacity and encourage alternatives such as off-peak driving, more tele-work and ride-sharing, and transit use. Tolls should be used to pay for maintenance and operations of roads, new lanes as needed for regional tolling, and for transit in the same corridors where the tolls are collected.
The legislature is already poised to approve electronic time-variable tolling in 2009 to help fund the replacement of the dangerously storm- and earthquake-prone State Route 520 Floating Bridge across Lake Washington. It is now considered highly likely that decision will also involve tolling the parallel Interstate 90 bridge across the lake.
The Viaduct replacement and cracked, snarled I-5 through Seattle, as well as I-405 and envisioned extensions of SR 167 to the Port of Tacoma and SR 509 south to Federal Way from SeaTac Airport all would benefit greatly from user-fee toll funding, as would deadly US 2 in Snohomish County, which alone needs nearly $2 billion in fixes. People are willing to pay tolls. Neither meager gas tax hikes (which are all that is politically possible) plus infrastructure stimulus spending will come close to covering the tens of billions of identified, high-priority roads projects in Puget Sound. Our population is to grow by half in the next 30 years. Let's not make this Viaduct decision with blinders on.
Over the long-haul, the deep-bored tunnel combined with surface transit improvements, is the most cost-effective, and effective way to replace the hulking, noisy, dirty, crime-friendly, crumbling Viaduct that makes distinctly unpleasant the experience of walking from downtown Seattle to waterfront venues along Elliott Bay.
The "cheap" solution, "surface-transit" only, would glaringly fail to meet thru traffic volume. The resulting traffic congestion and overcrowding of the downtown waterfront with vehicles would exact a huge cost on quality of life and the economy.
To supplant the aging and seismically vulnerable Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99, which blockades downtown Seattle from its waterfront, two elevated replacement options, three tunnel options and three surface/transit choices are under review. The state, King County and Seattle transportation department heads are to recommend a few semi-finalists as soon as the end of this week, with Governor Chris Gregoire, Seattle Mayor Gregoire, and King County Executive Ron Sims then to make a final choice to the legislature by the end of this month or the middle of next month at the latest.
But Susan Gilmore of the Seattle Times reports today that some members of the Stakeholders Advisory Committee (SAC) for the viaduct replacement process are very concerned about the integrity of the effort.
One of the eight options right now is a behemoth mixed-use elevated, enclosed roadway strongly favored by Washington House Speaker Frank Chopp (D-Seattle), whose power is considerable. Meanwhile, the Governor, Mayor and King County Executive may be leaning strongly toward a surface boulevard and enhanced transit option. Business interests on the SAC and others, including our Cascadia Center, argue that the 110,000 daily vehicle trips on the Viaduct cannot possibly be handled well on a surface boulevard, and that when full costs to business, drivers and the environment are factored in, the deep-bored tunnel option trumps any of the others. From today's Times article:
"It's very frustrating to me," said Peter Phillips, a stakeholder representing the Seattle Marine Business Coalition. "We don't get materials in time to review them. We are not involved in an engineering discussion; this is a political engineering discussion."....Given a chance to have his say, Phillips believes a surface option, which the city supports, would destroy the industrial neighborhoods that rely on the viaduct.
"Surface is the cheapest to build, but what about the economic mitigation costs," he says. "It now takes 20 minutes [on the viaduct] to get from Ballard to the Duwamish [River]. With surface, it will take more than an hour. "My fear is that the state will position the surface option as being equal to all other options in capacity and environmental impact with the caveat that if things turn out differently, they'll build something to address those issues later."
Another advisory committee member thinks the deep-bored tunnel would be the choice of a majority serving on the body, if they were allowed to take a vote, and that this option is getting short shrift.
At a recent stakeholder meeting, the frustrations bubbled over. "I'm really, really unhappy the way this is coming to an end," said stakeholder Vlad Oustimovitch, an architect from West Seattle. "Stage managing is going on to make [the stakeholder group] irrelevant. I'm uncomfortable sitting at this table."
Last week, the stakeholders were briefed on the economic implications of the eight viaduct plans. The problem is there was no plan for them to review: The economist hadn't released it.....(Oustimovitcvh said), "There's definitely been some backroom discussion among the three DOTs [the Washington, Seattle and King County departments of transportation]. There's the sense right now that some kind of surface alternative will get selected....Oustimovitch supports the deep-bore tunnel alternative, the most expensive at $3.5 billion, and one he believes would be everyone's first or second choice. He asserts the extra cost can be made up in two ways: directly through tolls and indirectly by economic savings, by being able to keep the viaduct open during construction.
A report completed last month for Cascadia Center by the international transportation engineering firm Arup found that deep-bored roadway tunnels similar to what would be required to replace the Viaduct typically cost in the range of $200-$700 million per mile, which would translate a range of $400 million to $1.4 billion here. Last week, Cascadia sent a letter to the three executives urging that they include the deep-bored tunnel option as a finalist. Also endorsing a "sub-surface" or tunnel solution in another letter to those officials last week were The Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Seattle Association, and the King County Labor Council.
The legislature budgeted $2.8 billion for viaduct replacement but about $1 billion has already been spent on related improvements and consultant work. The roughly $1.7 billion left - which must also cover about $400 million of downtown seawall replacement - could be augmented by tolling and investment from public employee union and building trades union pension funds. Additional funds from the city and Port of Seattle are a possibility.
The legislature makes the final decision on the replacement, during a busy session that begins next month. If the three execs choose a surface/transit option, the huge negative impacts on traffic and freight mobility in the SR 99/I-5 corridor will likely cause state lawmakers to reject that option, and quite possibly, settle for the elevated, enclosed roadway/mixed-use project supported by Speaker Chopp.
The SAC is to meet again tonight, in the Bertha Landes Room of Seattle City Hall, 600 4th Ave., at 5:30 p.m. It's expected that SAC member concerns will be thoroughly aired.
UPDATE, 5:10 p.m.: Tunnel construction industry experts based in Puget Sound today sent this letter to state, county and city officials, detailing the flaws with the current analysis of deep-bored tunnel costs. And on his show "The Conversation," KUOW-FM's Ross Reynolds hosted a discussion today titled "What Should Replace The Alaskan Way Viaduct?" Cascadia's Director Bruce Agnew was among the guests.
Transportation public-private partnerships should not be used to plug holes in a government budget. The proceeds should be directed to transportation capital investments. But the Chicago Tribune reports that under a new agreement starting January 1, the City of Chicago will lease for 75 years its 36,161 metered parking spaces to a Morgan Stanley partnership for $1.1 billion, with the proceeds going, variously: to patch the city budget through 2012; to a special fund to offset city revenue shortfalls tied to the economic downturn; to a special reserve fund; and to city programs for low-income individuals. I won't say this sort of, ah, creative attempt to breach city fiscal gaps smells exactly like the thousands of dead alewives that used to wash up on the 57th Street Beach in Hyde Park when I was growing up in Chicago, and giving tours of the captured German U-Boat at the Museum of Science and Industry. But it's sure not anywhere near what you'd call "best practices," either.
There are two upsides to the deal, which are not uncommon to P3s in transportation. A private management team with industry expertise will oversee the metered street parking system, including maintenance and operations. And a scarce public resource will be priced more competitively with private parking, driving more consumers to consider other options - like taking transit or ride-sharing, versus driving alone.
Back in the day, on temporary hiatus from college, I drove a limo for a service owned by a mean, badly-toupeed guy named Ribaldo - and used to pride myself on finding street parking for the beastly Caddies and stretch Lincolns in downtown Chicago anytime anywhere. But those days are as distant as a solvent federal gas tax trust fund.
As we've made clear repeatedly at this blog and elsewhere, we're all for properly structured public-private partnerships in surface transportation. P3s and heftier user fees through time-variable tolling, increased transit fares, and perhaps even a vehicle mileage tax will have to cover an increasing share of the infrastructure costs in major metro regions struggling to catch up with growth and beat congestion. The U.S. is improving but still far behind Europe, Canada and Australia in recognizing the robust life-cycle cost savings, accelerated project completion, and facility management benefits of transportation P3s.
However, public and political skepticism toward transportation P3s abounds, and one reason is that they can be used as cash cows to patch budget shortfalls resulting from poor management of public monies. For coherent, sound public stewardship, the lion's share of upfront proceeds to the government lessor in a P3 need to go back into the sector from whence they came, to meet high-priority infrastructure needs. Future cost avoidance and debt resolution may also be considered good cause for transportation P3s, but this "escape hatch" rationale has limited political appeal.
Chicago has been in the forefront of U.S. transportation P3s - a canary in the coal mine, if you will. The 2006 Chicago Skyway lease deal brought $1.8 billion to the city. As reported by the well-regarded magazine Illinois Issues, the proceeds went to: paying off city and Skyway debt; long-term investment reserves; mid-term investment with earnings used to help plug city budget holes until 2011; and after-school programs, parolee job training and services. Whiff of alewives, the prequel.
Another deal signed in 2006 had a better fragrance, fiscally. For $563 million the city entered a long-term lease with a private partnership to manage its underground parking garages on a long stretch beneath downtown city parks property including Grant Park - where for 25 years the world's largest free blues festival has been held, featuring such legends as Pinetop Perkins amidst a sea of liquid-fueled revelry. One of the garages was relatively new, but the rest were older, and one badly needed repairs. And parking garage management was not something at which the city excelled, versus, say, blues festivals. Better still, funds reaped from parks department properties went into new capital development for the city parks system. Then-City of Chicago Chief Financial Officer Dana Levenson told Parking Today:
"When an investor is waving a large check in front of you, it’s going to have some influence....The city was on the hook for the debt service...payments that the garage revenues were servicing. What this did was that if you took the price that was paid against the amount of debt that was outstanding, there was a significant amount of excess left over, not to mention the $65 million or so in cost avoidance … for the East Monroe Street Garage repair and rebuild.
You take that excess above and beyond the debt and you apply it to a capital budget for city parks throughout the city, not just downtown but throughout the neighborhoods. It was a rather elegant solution to a problem that we were having in terms of city parks that needed a capital budget and didn’t have one before that.
.....Ultimately, for any municipality looking at an asset like this, they have to think about, first and foremost, not that they are going to get a lot of money but what they are going to use the money for. The municipality that takes the money and plugs their budget hole is doing itself and the taxpayers such a disservice, because the following year they will have the same budget hole and then some and they will have nothing to show for it."
The city's P3 deal this fall to lease Midway Airport to a private operator yielded $2.5 billion. As the Chicago Tribune noted, under a special state law, ninety percent of the remainder, after debt resolution, has to be apportioned to infrastructure projects, or public employee union pension funds.
The latter are an emerging, and important source of capital for P3 infrastructure investments, which can earn steady long-term returns for pensioners. But many city governments - not to mention major U.S. automakers - have over-promised and under-delivered to employee pension funds. Sales of public assets should not be used to stanch that bleeding for a few moments.
In addition to exacting contracts with private partners to protect the public interest in locales where the political environment actually encourages P3s, what would make sense are comprehensive laws in still more U.S. states, removing barriers to transportation P3s. These laws should also require that all proceeds from the lease or sale to private operators of existing, publicly-owned transportation assets be reinvested in transportation. Any operating revenues which might be apportioned to the government owner of the leased facility, should be used similarly.
Put another way: don't rob Peter to pay Paul. Peter in this case representing those who pay every day with time and money to use inadequate, congested surface transportation systems in our country's major metro regions.
The group representing America's transportation and highway officials wants you to tell President-elect Obama and the next Congress what you think should be done about transportation. AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) today launched a campaign -- to run through inauguration day -- to make sure citizens' voices are shared with the 111th Congress and the 44th president. The Web site, www.IToldThePresident.org, lets you send comments or video.
AASHTO represents state departments of transportation. According to its release announcing the online campaign, "State departments of transportation (DOTs) across the country will be encouraging citizens to post videos about what's happening in their communities."
Click below to read the extended post and to view AASHTO's press release.
The Washington Post paints an accurate picture of the surface transportation funding and financing crisis that will confront President-elect Barack Obama (below at right), Congress, and Obama's pick to head the U.S. Department of Transportation.
As roads and bridges are crumbling and cracking and transit systems struggling with rising costs and ridership, the U.S. Highway Trust Fund is in bad repair itself. Headed for bankruptcy and saved last fall only by an $8 billion raid of the U.S. Treasury's General Fund, this highway and transit account dates to 1956 and relies on a federal gas tax that hasn't been raised from the current level of 18.4 cents per gallon for 15 years. A high-profile federal commission has urged the tax be hiked to 40 cents per gallon, but that's unlikely, given the economy's woes, and the politics of raising taxes.
Yet, to ensure highways and transit can support economic growth as U.S. population booms in coming decades, surface transportation spending will need to rise from the current $140 billion a year ($50 billion from the feds, $90 billion from the states), to $225 billion per annum. What else besides a gas tax hike should be considered? The Post:
Other ideas to raise revenue include expanding toll roads, increasing public-private partnerships and using congestion pricing, a system in which motorists or transit passengers pay more during peak travel periods. Another idea, which is being tried in Oregon, is to charge motorists a tax based not on the gas they buy but on the number of miles they drive.
The Clinton administration experimented with some of these initiatives, but the Bush Transportation Department has embraced them, particularly toll roads and public-private partnerships. Under Bush, the department has been shrinking the federal role in road building and public transportation and opening the sector to private investors who assume the risks of building the projects in exchange for profits from tolls and fees. Congressional Democrats and some Republicans, along with transit advocates, have accused the department of rationing good road transportation to those who can afford fees, tolls and taxes. In some cases, the public-private partnerships have lacked adequate protection of the public interest, according to reports by the GAO.
"We need to look at all kinds of alternatives," said William Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association, an industry group that represents transit systems. "Tax credit bonds, public-private partnerships, tolling, user fees - we should be looking at it not from an ideological standpoint but from a very practical standpoint. . . . There may be places even in public transit where you could charge more for certain services."
In a sidebar, the Post profiles four leading contenders for the DOT hot seat, including Mort Downey of PB Consult, and ex-FAA head Jane Garvey. Obama and the Congress will really hold the cards, but the DOT pick will have to do some heavy lifting, including broad coalition-building.
Cost-saving, exacting "design-build-operate-maintain" (or DBOM) contracting arrangements need to become more prevalent. More state legislatures should take whatever steps are necessary to make it easier for public employee pension funds to invest in road, bridge, tunnel and transit projects while meeting their market-rate fiduciary obligations to pensioners. This means eschewing lower-rate state highway bonds in favor of P3 partnerships where the pension funds help provide investment capital through alternative means such as a private infrastructure investment fund or direct investment, in return for a share of toll or fare proceeds over the long term.
That long-term orientation is a plus. Although nearly all U.S. public employee and building trade pension funds have taken a hit during the financial meltdown, they're still flush, typically with with tens upon tens of billions in assets, and a growing interest in diversifying further - into more stable investment classes such as infrastructure.
Another key element of the strategy going forward must be time-variable pricing of roadways and transit. We all pay for the water and electricity we use according to our own consumption patterns, often with higher charges for peak-period use, and no one cries out about economic injustice - either because of the pay-as-you go approach or the peak differentials. The same model should be more broadly applied to surface transportation infrastructure, especially as demand grows, supply becomes constrained, and maintenance and operations costs threaten to continue spiraling upward.
A report titled "Large Diameter Soft Ground Bored Tunnel Review" has just been released by the transportation think tank Cascadia Center and global engineering and consulting firm Arup. It strongly suggests that a new state cost estimate for a deep bored tunnel of approximately two miles to replace the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct could be greatly inflated.
The state’s Alaskan Way Viaduct Stakeholders Committee (SAC) pegs the cost of the one-mile tunnel at $3.5 billion, but the Cascadia-Arup report surveyed deep-bored vehicle tunnels worldwide and found costs typically fall in the range of $200 million-$700 million per mile, for large diameter soft ground bored tunnels, created with assistance of a tunnel boring machine (pictured below at right).
A Nov. 20 Cascadia letter with 2 summary charts on tunnel costs, plus the Arup report, were distributed to SAC members at the SAC’s Nov. 20 meeting, where SAC cost estimates for eight different Viaduct replacement options, including the deep bored tunnel, were unveiled.
In its letter to the SAC, Cascadia Center notes:
Surface street and transit improvements will help replace the Viaduct, but 70 percent of the traffic is bypass or freight;
Deep bored tunnel technology is widely used, and provides lower full-life cycle costs than above-ground roadways;
Environment and urban design are enhanced with a tunnel;
A deep bored tunnel to replace the viaduct would likely cost in the range of $200-$700 million per mile.
SAC is expected to winnow down the eight options to three recommended for further consideration. In December, Governor Christine Gregoire, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and King County Executive Ron Sims are to recommend one option. The state legislature will make the final decision.
Cascadia has learned from sources close to the proceedings that one quarter of the $3.5 billion SAC estimate for the deep bore tunnel is for design fees. These can be dramatically reduced, along with risk management and construction timeline costs, through a properly detailed “design-build-operate-maintain” contract with a project management consortium. In addition, time-variable tolling in the SR 99/I-5 corridor, including the proposed tunnel, could help fund the project.
Yesterday, one of our burning questions was answered: Are those automatic cars really avoiding things on their own?
Well it turns out that at least one is - as was proven today (unintentionally) by ITS America CEO Scott Belcher. Scott walked across the 11th Ave. test track unaware that a live demonstration was going on. A second later an autonomous SSTI test vehicle came zipping around some barrels. Some excitement ensued as the vehicle detected him and automatically stopped. Security started yelling (until he realized it was his boss in the track). So Scott cheats death (and so do a few engineers, I’d imagine) and the SSTI crew gets a good story to tell.
Unfortunately, even despite the new votes of confidence, no one was willing to let me hop in the back seat of one of those fancy cars with a few drinks and tour Manhattan with no driver. I can see it now: “Yes, officer, I have been drinking, but the car hasn’t, and it's the one that was driving."
There's typically a lot of green between Tennessee and Oregon. But the two states have something in common when it comes to the future of vehicle technology: Nissan has selected both states (the only two so far) to debut its all-electric car in 2010.
The Oregonian's Richard Read reports that Nissan was drawn to Oregon's "green vision," including its installation of vehicle charging hubs.
Under Gov. Ted Kulongoski's leadership, Oregon is already building electric vehicle charging stations. And Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen penned an understanding this summer to begin building stations in the Volunteer State. The first roll-out of the vehicles will be for government and commercial fleets.
Click below to read the extended post and The Oregonian's coverage.
The primary order of business Wednesday was to take my search for the best signal control system global. One could be forgiven for thinking that since there are large cities all over the world, there must be other signal control systems that rival the best ones in the United States.
It turns out that there is some merit to this way of thinking, but it must be heavily nuanced. America is unique in that it has relatively young cities that were developed with cars in mind. Their hallmarks are heavy use of grids and obsessive traffic control systems; quite a contrast to the ancient citadels of Europe with their medieval layouts, ring roads and excessive use of roundabouts.
It stands to reason that traffic engineers in New York and Los Angeles don’t build adaptive signal systems with giant roundabouts in mind. Nonetheless it seems worth examining how other large foreign cities tackle this problem.
I started with our English speaking neighbors across the pond. According to the Directorate of Traffic Operations for London Streets, they have around 6,000 signals in London, 3,000 of which are purely locally controlled (not controlled by their TMC). Many of these are pedestrian controlled mid-block crossings. Nineteen percent of them are centrally controlled fixed time lights and 30 percent (2,000) are adaptive.
Someone's epiphany that cooperation and open standards are far better for everyone is beginning to bear fruit. We're starting to see instances of the best technology being improved by one agency and then released into the wild for others to use. One of the many examples of this philosophy here is New York City's award winning new Applied Solid-state Traffic Controller (ASTC). This is the box that physically controls the lights, grabs sensor data, etc.
Monday saw ITSA's Chairman of the Board Randell Iwasaki blush as he handed award after award to various projects involving Caltrans, his institutional home, at the Best of ITS Awards ceremony. Caltrans deserves a lot of credit. They've been busy testing, deploying and partnering on projects covering everything from using GPS enabled cell phones to monitor traffic, to VII implementations, and my personal favorite--adaptive signal controls.
Then there was Sensys Networks snagging an award for a deployment of their wireless vehicle detection technology with a grant from (you guessed it) Caltrans. I believe the line was "installs in 10 minutes, transmits for up to 10 years." Pretty impressive stuff--battery powered, as accurate as loop detectors, and not affected by weather. Caltrans is deploying 5,106 of them in 800 locations.
Sensys Flush Mount Wireless Vehicle Detector
One of the most brilliant systems is a bit of simple elegance rarely seen in any infrastructure project. Instead of trying to change drivers' behavior by charging them more to drive on the road they want, Caltrans District 4 deployed variable message signs on major routes around the San Francisco area that informed drivers of how current travel times on the road compared against the real time travel times of transit options. This tiny bit of information lead to a substantial increase in transit ridership. It seems almost silly in hindsight, but if a superior transit option exists and drivers know about it, they often will choose transit of their own free will. In this case they didn't have to spend a single dollar on roads or transit, just a way to deliver compelling information to their target market.
On Sunday, the 2008 ITS World Congress kicked-off its biggest event ever in NYC. Guests were treated to a top-notch opening ceremony that miraculously managed to fit in half a dozen speakers and artistic performances ranging from hip hop to opera, violins, ballet and Broadway favorites.
New York City has closed down and renamed 11th Ave. in front of the convention center (name is now ITS World Congress Blvd.) for demonstrations of exotic technologies such as automatic collision avoidance and driverless autonomous vehicles.
Legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers sat down for an interview at the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and shared some thoughts in this video from ZDNet (click here or on embed below):
The money quote:
The most important thing (President-elect Barack Obama) has got to do is kick start a huge amount of innovation and research in energy. We invest less than a billion dollars a year in renewable energy research and that's contrasted with health care which is $32 billion, and I think we've just scratched the surface in terms of clean ways to use energy, to create energy. It's the challenge of our generation. It's the scourge of our economy.
Doerr also said the nation must figure out ways to increase the number of graduates in science and engineering and ensure that foreign nationals educated here in those fields are able to stay here as legal residents and help address clean-tech challenges such as renewable energy.
Developing vehicles that can run on clean electricity and second-generation net-green bio-fuels remains a high priority despite sharp drops in the price of gas from this summer's record highs. Cascadia Senior Fellow Steve Marshall and Bullit Foundation President Denis Hayes explain why in a recent Seattle Post-Intelligencer op-ed on the promise of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
Five years ago oil cost $23 a barrel. Despite the recent wild swings, oil prices remain historically high. Last year the U.S. paid $300 billion for imported oil, and this year we will double that. According to Henry Kissinger, our foreign oil purchases have resulted in the "largest transfer of wealth in human history." What's worse is that a major share of the world's oil revenues ends up in countries hostile to our interests, undemocratic or both....With 97 percent of all transportation fueled by oil, we have had no choice other than to pay up until now. But with recent advances in more powerful, lighter-weight and durable batteries, we can begin to replace oil with electricity in light-duty transportation.
Every new internal combustion car that's sold will make it more difficult for us to reduce our oil dependence. And over its lifetime each such vehicle will also generate several tons of global warming gases a year. Around Puget Sound, transportation produces more greenhouse gases than all other sources combined.
....Cleaner, cheaper domestic electricity offers our best available opportunity to move beyond oil in transportation. A (state fleet) moratorium on buying new gasoline vehicles with a plan to buy the coming plug-ins would be an added incentive to automakers to speed up the transition we need for the economy, national security and the environment.
Earlier this fall, Cascadia Center - with co-sponsors including Idaho National Laboratory and Microsoft - staged a conference titled "Beyond Oil: Transforming Transportation," which explored new paradigms in transportation and energy. A rich archive page of the event is here, including speaker presentations, videos and media coverage. Under "Day Two Video Segments," don't miss electric car visionary Shai Agassi; former CIA director James Woolsey; and Microsoft's Chief Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard.
The State Route 520 Tolling Implementation Committee's "November Scenario Evaluation" document released yesterday shows that the most robust regional financing for replacing the dangerously sub-par 520 bridge comes from time-variable tolling on it starting in 2010 and tolling the parallel I-90 span across Lake Washington, starting in 2010 or 2016. Tolling in this key east-west corridor would be done on the fly, electronically, with vehicle windshield transponders and overhead gantries; no toll booths. Tolls that vary by time of day are likely, though flat rates are also an option. Special lanes that would be free to buses and ride-sharers could be made available to solo drivers, for a price.
The committee's members are WSDOT Secretary Paula Hammond (pictured, left), Puget Sound Regional Council Executive Director Bob Drewel, and Washington State Transportation Commission board member Richard Ford. This latest analysis, along with public comment, will inform a January, 2009 final report from the committee to the state legislature, which is then to approve a tolling plan for the SR 520 bridge and perhaps the I-90 bridge as well. Then, specific toll rates would be set by the state transportation commission and approved by the legislature, with construction of pontoons for the new 520 bridge beginning later in 2009 if all goes as envisioned.
The weary and crowded 1963-vintage 520 bridge connects Seattle with Eastside job centers such as Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland but is at major risk of catastrophic failure in a 70 mph windstorm, or earthquake. At the same time, growing regional traffic congestion has prompted a public warming to expansion of regional transit, and bettered the odds for a system of electronic, time-variable tolling on major highways and state routes across metro Puget Sound. A priced-lanes pilot project for carpoolers and solo drivers is already underway on SR 167, and flat-rate electronic tolling in place, to rave reviews, on the new southbound span of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
The 520 tolling committee's latest report reveals that:
Starting tolling in 2010 instead of at bridge completion in 2016 would pry loose an additional $400-$500 million, lowering the costs of bond borrowing for construction, which is to be repaid by tolls;
The most revenue toward completion of the $3.7 to $3.9 billion project comes from tolling both the SR 520 and I-90 bridges starting in 2010 ($2.4 billion, Scenario #9) or 520 in 2010 and I-90 in 2016 ($2.4 billion, Scenario #4);
One-way tolls on both bridges would range from 75 cents off-peak to $2.95 at peak hours in Scenario #9, and from 75 cents off-peak to $3.25 at peak in Scenario #4;
Tolling 520 alone starting in 2010 (Scenario #7) would cut peak-hour traffic volume in the vicinity of 17 to 26 percent while peak-hour flow would rise three to seven percent on I-90;
Tolling both 520 and I-90 starting in 2016 (Scenario #9) would deliver peak-hour volume cuts of 10 to 11 percent on 520 and 12-16 percent on I-90, as commuters shift travel times or use transit;
Time-variable tolling increases peak-hour speeds on 520 by 13-16 mph, nearly double the speed gain from flat toll rates.
The committee will continue to get an earful at public hearings this week and next from tolling opponents who somehow imagine they are a due a free ride because the construction, maintenance and operations costs of Puget Sound roads and bridges, as population continues to swell in coming decades, can somehow all be covered by the incredible shrinking gas tax and.......what? More sales tax hikes or vehicle fees?They're nice if you can get 'em, but the well only runs so deep.
Pay as you go is the way to go in this day and age - coupled with cost-saving, performance-based consortium contracting to design, build, operate and maintain surface transportation facilities and systems.
The four-lane SR 520 bridge across the lake is to be replaced with a six-lane structure. Current plans call for two "general purpose" lanes and one high-occupancy vehicle lane in each direction, the former would be tolled either via either a flat or time-variable rate if a plan is adopted. This is confirmed by WSDOT, though it can get a bit confusing because one doesn't necessarily think of general purpose lanes as being tolled. On the I-90 bridge, the agency also confirms, tolling would be on all general purpose vehicle lanes, except under one scenario that exempts eastbound traffic from Mercer Island. On both bridges the possible HOV lane could be designated a High Occupancy and Toll (HOT lane), free to transit and ride-share vehicles, but also available, for a toll, to solo drivers.
The more time-variable tolling, and the sooner, the better: it will further drive alternative choices such as ride-sharing and telework, and raise more money for regional surface transportation needs, transit included.
The policy decisions to come on tolling the SR 520 bridge, and perhaps the I-90 bridge as well, are an important turning point for the state and region. Going forward, a broad regional plan to implement time-variable tolling on several highways and major state routes is needed. That would allocate scarce peak-hour capacity, ease congestion, and help pay for billions more in needed safety, repair and mobility improvements on I-5, SR 99, SR 704, SR 509, US 2 and I-405/SR 167.
The question is, how serious are we about doing this? The legislature will provide the first piece of the answer when it next meets.
California won voter approval this week to attempt development of an approximately $44 billion intercity high speed rail system, connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles with later extensions to Sacramento, San Diego, and Riverside County, east of L.A. (Artist's rendering below). Top speed is billed as 220 miles per hour.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that in addition to the $10 billion in government-backed bonds okayed by voters, the California High Speed Rail Authority will shoot for another $10 billion in federal aid and billions more from private investors. Other private partners might join in, to help the state manage construction, and operate the system.
It's the beginning of a big headache," joked Mehdi Morshed, director of the authority. "But it's the good kind. We're looking forward to it."
But possible pitfalls include land acquisition, environmental obstacles, cost overruns, construction delays, and failure to achieve ridership and travel time projections. The San Jose Mercury News reports:
James Moore, a professor and director of the transportation engineering program at the University of Southern California....said he believes the project's backers have overstated ridership projections and the trains' maximum speed in urban areas, while underestimating the costs of acquiring right-of-way, building the system and operating the trains. Still, many of the state's top political leaders endorsed the bond issue, along with business and construction interests, including the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. The rail network would be a boon for Silicon Valley because it would bring lower-priced housing in Central Valley communities within a comfortable commuting range of less than an hour's ride to the Bay Area, (High Speed Rail Authority board member Rod) Diridon said. He added: "That makes it so much easier to recruit top talent."
Backers have claimed the project will create 160,000 construction jobs and eventually 450,000 jobs in other industries that benefit from the transit network. Diridon, a driving force behind creation of Santa Clara County's light-rail system, said construction contracts could go out to bid by 2011 and an initial north-south line could be in operation by 2020.
To serve the same number of travelers as the high-speed train system, California would have to build nearly 3,000 lane-miles of freeway plus five airport runways and 90 departure gates by 2020 – costing more than twice the high-speed train system and having much greater environmental impacts. What’s more, the proposed high-speed train system will provide lower passenger costs than for travel by automobile or air for the same city-to-city markets.
It's looking like an opportune time for ramping up inter-city rail in the U.S. President-elect Barack Obama wants to see more high speed inter-city passenger rail, as do many key members of the U.S. House and Senate. The surface transportation reauthorization bill in 2009 and the push for a national transportation stimulus spending package will provide a vehicle for additional passenger rail system development. Already, by a veto-proof majority Congress last month passed a $13.1 billion passenger rail funding bill including $3.4 billion for high speed rail corridors and state passenger rail improvement projects.
In the Cascadia region, the Amtrak Cascades service from Eugene, Oregon through Portland to Seattle would benefit greatly from construction of a third rail between Portland and Seattle, allowing separation of freight from passenger rail. Upgrades to or replacement of at-grade rail-road crossings are also key, and combined with a third rail for freight could allow the Portland-Seattle Spanish-made Talgo passenger train to travel closer to its top speed of 110 mph. It now doesn't usually exceed 70 mph and averages less than that. When running on time, the Portland-Seattle run currently clocks in at three-and-a-half hours, longer - in most instances - than driving. Shaving six minutes off the trip with a routing change through Tacoma is a start, but more work remains.
With major population growth projected for metro Portland and Seattle, and a new $4 billion bridge to be built across the Columbia River between Portland and Washington state, it would be smart to boost non-vehicular travel alternatives in the I-5 corridor with an investment in speedier Seattle-Portland passenger and freight rail. The cost for necessary improvements would likely run into the low billions, but yield a great net benefit in eased delays, saved vehicle emissions and improved freight mobility. Our ability to meet similar challenges across the nation with improved rail mobility will help drive U.S. mastery of the global economy. We snooze, we lose.
California's ambitious high speed rail project bears close watching. Now that the enabling ballot measure has passed, skeptics should be trying to add value with suggestions on cost control and optimizing performance. However this grand initiative fares, growth in the West Coast Corridor from Baja to B.C. is only going to intensify in decades to come. From one end of the corridor to the other, the time to solidify plans for better, faster inter-city passenger and freight rail is now.
Construction began last week on a High Occupancy and Toll (HOT) lane to serve carpoolers, transit and - for a price varying by miles travelled and time of day - solo drivers, on a 14-mile stretch of southbound I-680 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The highway connects the jobs-rich Silicon Valley region with populous East Bay communities to the north. Electronic tolling will be employed, using transponders and overhead gantries. Carpoolers will cover their onboard transponders to avoid being charged. Some commuters are expected to save 30 minutes in the express lane, while congestion will be eased in the general use lanes as well. It's all part of a much broader, 25-year, $6.1 billion toll-financed plan to build, operate and maintain a Bay Area HOT lane system. The plan was developed by the nine-county Metropolitan Transportation Commission. The aim is creation of 800 miles of HOT lanes on the region's highways to make driving and bus transit more predictable and reliable, while encouraging alternatives to peak-hour solo drives. As Gary Richards of the San Jose Mercury-News reports, the initiative is seen as a real game-changer:
Traffic officials described the Bay Area tolling plan in no uncertain terms: revolutionary, dramatic and bold. "The entire nation will be watching," said Gene Fong, the California chief with the Federal Highway Administration, referring to transportation officials' interest in the potential for widespread use of toll lanes. Added John Ristow, lead highway planner with the Valley Transportation Authority: "It'll have as big of an impact as building BART in the '60s. There will be such a dramatic change in the way people get around."
HOT lanes are an example of what is called "congestion pricing," which includes not only variably-priced lanes, but variably-priced highways and urban core parking. The road-pricing strategy continues to gain currency in the national media for its transformational potential. Last week, New York Times syndicated columnist David Brooks, in a widely-read piece titled, "A National Mobility Project," wrote:
Americans now spend 3.5 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, a figure expected to double by 2020. The U.S. population is projected to increase by 50 percent over the next 42 years. American residential patterns have radically changed. Workplaces have decentralized. Commuting patterns are no longer radial, from suburban residences to central cities. Now they are complex weaves across broad megaregions. Yet the infrastructure system hasn’t adapted. The smart thing to do is announce a short-term infrastructure initiative to accelerate all those repair projects that can be done within a few years. Then, begin a long-term National Mobility Project.
Create a base-closings-like commission to organize federal priorities (Congress has forfeited its right to micromanage). Streamline the regulations that can now delay project approval by five years. Explore all the new ideas that are burgeoning in the transportation world - congestion pricing, smart highways, rescue plans for shrinking Midwestern cities, new rail and airplane technologies. When you look into this sector, you see we are on the cusp of another transportation revolution.
The Bay Area has already taken this kind of thinking to heart. This July, 2008 "principles" document from the MTC says the system will utilize existing rights-of-way and focus on corridors and so-called "commute sheds," while reinvesting revenues where they're raised and directing spending not only to system operations and maintenance, but also "non-highway options." These are to include transit, and easing traffic bottlenecks for carpoolers and buses on arterial "collector" routes. The plan will be refined and overseen by the region's Congestion Management Agencies (CMA), Caltrans, California Highway Patrol, and the Bay Area Toll Authority.
In addition to the work starting on I-680, HOT lanes are already being built on I-580. Among other planned projects in the network are HOT lanes for the I-880/Highway 237 interchange, the length of Highway 85, and Highway 101, from Morgan Hill to Palo Alto.
The Oakland Tribune's editorial board explains why they think it's all a ripping good idea:
Toll revenues would pay for construction of additional HOT lanes so that they would be available to motorists almost anywhere in the Bay Area. Today, carpool lanes often end near intersections and are missing altogether on many stretches of highway. Perhaps even more important than building new HOT lanes, the MTC's plan would construct and improve key highway connectors throughout the Bay Area. All too often today, traffic bottlenecks occur near intersections where there are not enough lanes to accommodate carpools.
Another part of the MTC plan is the creation of an express bus system that would significantly enhance mass transit in many parts of the Bay Area. One of the major problems with bus transportation today is the lack of a continuous carpool or HOT-lane system. As a result, buses are forced to slow down to a crawl in many locations, especially at intersections of major highways. Also, there are not enough express buses. Most of them make so many stops along their routes that they are not useful for longer commutes. Express buses on a continuous HOT-lane system would be a great improvement and are likely to attract far more riders than they have today.
A full-on regional "system" approach is the way to implement HOT lanes, with an accent on better service delivery for transit, ride-share vehicles and solo drivers. It's encouraging that HOT lanes are already implemented in a score of different locales across the U.S . and that more are coming.
Major metro regions that step up to the complex mobility challenge will reap economic benefits that laggard competitors won't.
The Washington State Department of Transportation last spring began a four-year pilot project to see how High Occupancy and Toll (HOT) lanes would work on a nine-mile stretch of State Route 167 in the near-south suburban part of the Seattle region, from Renton to Auburn. Carpoolers and transit use the fast lanes for free, solo drivers pay a sliding-scale fee based on current congestion. It's all electronic, with gantries and transponders, not a toll booth in sight, thank goodness. Prices can range from 50 cents to $9 on SR 167's HOT lanes, but have tended toward the lower end of the scale so far. The aim is to keep traffic flowing at 45 mph or higher at least 90 percent of the time. HOT lanes are one form of a broader strategy known as congestion pricing that can also be applied to all lanes of a highway, and (theoretically) to all roads and streets in a metro region through the use of GPS devices on vehicles. The higher the demand at a given time, the higher the charge, is the basic idea.
The big knock on HOT lanes by critics nationwide has been that because of those tolls for solo drivers, they are really so-called "Lexus Lanes," amenable only to the rich and privileged, who are more likely to drive luxury cars. Those driving Fords and Chevys would be priced right out of the HOT lanes, according to this argument.
But the chart below, presented yesterday by WSDOT to the Washington State Transportation Commission, shows the opposite. From May through July, 2008, the vehicles most often using the SR 167 HOT lanes were.......Fords and Chevys. By miles. Followed by Toyota, Honda, Dodge and Nissan. Luxury models are much lower.
Some of this has to do with the auto demographics, if you will, of South King County. It's not Lexus-land by any stretch. Some of it may have to to do with the average price of the tolls in the SR 167 HOT lanes through September 25 of this year, a whopping $1.07, as reported by WSDOT here at this writing. Usage has been modest so far, between 1,100 and 1,300 drivers a day. Regionally, that will change, as more HOT lanes are built to accommodate growth and help fund projects. Adding to the 2000 population base of 3.2 million, another metro Portland worth of residents (1.7 million people) are projected to descend on Puget Sound in the next 32 years.
If there were HOT lanes on SR 520 and I-90 - and that could be in the pipeline, as KIRO 7 TV reported last night - we'd see a somewhat higher proportion of luxury vehicles, higher trip totals than on SR 167 now, and thus probably a higher average price. But there'd still be plenty of Toyotas, Nissans, Fords, Chevys, Chryslers, Hondas and Subarus using those HOT lanes - because we all value our time.
We can study the social equity implications further with detailed studies of actual income levels of HOT lane users, as opposed to vehicle types. Some jurisdictions might choose to offer discounts for lower-income drivers when charges exceed a certain level.
But the time is ripe for a new moniker. "Ford Lanes"? "Chevy Lanes"? Or how about, "Everyman's Lanes?"
Maybe state officials should get a suggestion on this from the Democratic Leadership Council. They're big fans of HOT lanes.
I had a telling conversation with an old friend several months ago, a devoted environmentalist who's a community college biology teacher living south of San Francisco in a pleasant small town abutting the Pacific. I don't recall how it came up, but she declared, "We've just got to get more people out of their cars." Then came a pregnant pause, followed by her admission that of course, because of where they lived and worked and their packed daily schedules, she and her husband drove themselves and their children everywhere.
I've been thinking about this lately because, well, the roads are still chock full of cars and trucks, and despite an uptick in transit and bicycle use, traffic is still congested here in metro Seattle, and metro regions nationwide. Meanwhile, U.S. surface transportation will needs require some $12.5 trillion (yes, with a "T") over the next 50 years according to a landmark federal report issued this year. But the way we fund such projects is broken, relying too much on dwindling by-the-gallon gas taxes due to improved fuel efficiency, and ever more difficult local and regional sales tax hikes.
The historical trends show whopping increases in U.S. miles driven and gasoline supplied. We've gone from 2 million barrels of gas a day in the 1950s to more than 9 million per day by 2007, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports. The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports that U.S. vehicle miles travelled (VMT) multiplied more than fourfold from 1960 to three trillion in 2006. Though the term "highway" is sometimes attached to VMT, they are estimated monthly for all U.S. roads and streets, drawing from data gathered at 4,000 continuous traffic counting locations.
During the oil and gas price run-up earlier this year, drawing considerable media attention were marginal decreases, of a few percentage points only, in monthly and calendar year-to-date U.S. VMT compared to a year ago. Even a slight dip in VMT draws notice in a time when some celebrate the end of suburbia and advocate "carectomies."
One can hope. These days, it seems that every seminar addressing surface transportation and every green "visioning" session includes earnest discussion of how to "reduce vehicle miles travelled." To the skeptic, the imperative sounds like one of those wishful commands sported on the seven-bumper-stickered Subaru Outbacks endemic to Seattle, like "World Peace Now," or "End Poverty." It's an appealing idea, sure. But the devil is in the details.
In the meantime, there's still a pressing need to deal with roadway and bridge wear and tear, and increased congestion resulting from exponential VMT growth during a post-Interstate-building era when transportation investment chronically lagged. One reminder comes via veteran Chicago Tribune transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch, who this month wrote that despite a five percent regional drop in VMT, traffic congestion there has remained high. One big reason:
Roadways were already so badly saturated with traffic before the recent spikes in fuel prices that the decline in miles traveled hasn't significantly loosened the gridlock.
Most daily trips in metro regions actually aren't to and from work, a point often overlooked. But many of those trips by their nature are less likely to involve transit. If you're going to Costco or Lowe's or Target, to your in-laws in Olympia or friends in Lynnwood, to curriculum night at your kid's school across town, or your cottage on Whidbey Island, you're most likely to be driving. Of total daily trips in the four-county core of the Puget Sound region, only four percent were via scheduled public transit, according to a 2006 Puget Sound Regional Council survey (second paragraph of p. E-6, here).
Work-related travel is somewhat more predictable and there's more room, potentially, to change behavior and actually get some people out of their cars, some of the time. But progress there had been scant. The BTS also reports that - based on federal surveys and Census data - between 1989 and 2006 the percentage of U.S. workers for whom the principal means of transport to work was solo driving, remained at 76. Those workers usually carpooling declined very slightly, to 10 percent of the workforce over the same 17-year stretch, and those usually taking public transportation decreased from 4.6 percent to 4.3 percent. Walking, biking, taxi and "other" principal means of conveyance to work grew from a combined 4.7 percent of the workforce in 1989 to 5 percent in 2006, while telecommuting increased from 2.6 percent to 3.9 percent.
Numbers for 2007 and 2008 will likely show some decrease in solo driving to work, and a shade more transit use nationally, but without drawing up a whole new landscape, prospects remain iffy for reducing VMT or merely curtailing its growth.
As politically unpalatable as it seems now - and that would be "very" - some experts believe within a few decades we'll be tolling not just managed highway lanes with time- or congestion-related variable fees, but tolling every mile travelled, via GPS devices planted on most if not all vehicles. "VMT tolling" or "mileage fees" have already been studied in Puget Sound and Oregon, and imposed on heavy trucks in Germany. This month, the Atlanta Regional Commission mused publicly about the unsustainability of the federal gas tax and the attractiveness of mileage fees. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:
The board of the Atlanta Regional Commission is studying the idea of eventually dropping the federal gas tax, the main source of transportation funding, as it looks for “sustainable” transportation funding. The gas tax doesn’t rise with inflation and gets weaker every year. The ARC, metro Atlanta’s planning agency, hasn’t approved a final statement on the issue and has no authority to implement it. The agency is giving its recommendations to Congress, as it begins to look toward renewing the multiyear federal transportation funding law.
The gas tax is charged as cents-per-gallon instead of cents-per-dollar, so the same size tank always reaps the same amount of money in taxes, no matter how much the price of gas goes up. In addition, as people get more fuel-efficient cars, they use less gas, and so pay less gas tax. The ARC suggests more research on one of the more talked-about ideas, an odometer charge, or vehicle miles traveled. Such a charge would tax drivers by the amount of miles they drive. The idea is for drivers to pay for the wear they put on the roads. Depending on how sophisticated the tracking is, it could send the tax paid directly to the jurisdictions whose roads the driver uses. To avoid getting weaker every year, as the gas tax does, it would have to be designed to rise with inflation.
For now, to untie Atlanta's grimly congested traffic, the state transportation department is pushing a $400-million-plus plan to convert the region's 44 miles of carpool lanes to electronically-tolled high-occupancy and toll (HOT) lanes, which are open to carpoolers and transit for free, and to solo drivers for a variable fee depending on time of day or congestion levels. Nearly half of the spending would be for added bus service and park-and-ride lots along the HOT lane corridors.
Closer to home, the rationale for considering mileage fees was also well-stated by Oregon officials. A report from ODOT to the state legislature makes the case for advance planning even if political acceptance isn't an immediate prospect.
The first question people ask about the pilot program for mileage fees is, “Why are you doing this?” The answer is simple. Oregon is preparing for the day when a substantial number of motorists are driving highly fuel efficient vehicles and no longer paying enough gasoline taxes to support their road system.....that day may come about ten years from now. No one in Oregon proposes immediate implementation of an electronically collected mileage fee. Investigation and preparation for a new revenue system, however, is warranted because of the long lead time necessary for any change.
The vehicle mileage tax is probably the answer. Rather than taxing people based on the amount of gas they buy, it would tax them based on the number of miles they drive. Most likely, this would be done by installing tamper-proof devices in vehicles that would transmit mileage information to a tax office, though the data also could simply be confirmed by a certified mechanic. Some states are performing pilot studies on mileage taxes, but they're a long way from having all the bugs worked out - there are serious technical and logistics questions, not to mention privacy concerns (many people are uncomfortable beaming information about their driving habits to the government). Nonetheless, a mileage tax makes sense because it rightly puts the burden for building and maintaining roads on the shoulders of those who use them, even if they happen to drive high-mileage cars.
I'll admit to deep ambivalence about tolling every mile travelled. It's not about the privacy concerns, which to me seem exaggerated. But mileage fees feel like pervasive fiscal over-reach, no matter how reasonable the peak-hour charges and how meaty the off-peak discounts which would need to be part of any such package. I always eschew a car rental agreement that includes any kind of mileage fee. So I'm not supporting mileage fees here, and Cascadia Center has made no such endorsement either. But, we have hosted public conversations on the topic, and the national dialog on mileage fees will continue to gain impetus because tax funding for surface transportation will need to be leavened more and more with a variety of updated pay-as-you-go strategies.
Whatever one's feelings - and they are likely to be intense - mileage fees with off-peak discounts, and a robust but revenue-neutral national carbon tax could drive increased off-peak travel, greater transit usage, and tele-work.
How soon any of this will happen, if ever, is unclear. What's more clear now is that we like living in the suburbs and that driving is often a necessity. In the suburbs, housing costs are less, though bargains have crept toward the edges, which in turn increases VMT. Suburban public schools aren't always ideal, but are much less problematic than urban public schools. More and more jobs are dispersed across metro regions, in varied suburban locales. Meanwhile, the vision of "living close to work" is reality only for a lucky, small slice of the populace.
Puget Sound voters will get a chance to weigh in on a $17.9 billion second-phase Sound Transit proposal next month that would extend the starter north-south light rail line in both directions and east, and add to existing ST express bus and commuter rail service. Other regional needs include replacing the shaky Alaskan Way Viaduct and SR 520 bridge, fixing dangerous US 2 in Snohomish County; revising tangled interchanges and repairing cracked pavement on I-5 in Seattle (a crucial but unfunded $2 billion job that's rarely discussed); and building key missing links in Pierce County, such as the Cross-Base Highway and the SR 167 connector to the Port of Tacoma.
Funding the roads piece, and any major additions to the regional transit infrastructure beyond the pending "Sound Transit 2" plan, will be daunting. Regional taxpayers here aren't a bottomless well. And the federal role in surface transportation funding has been heading into permanent decline, as Atlanta's planners and the L.A. Times both pointedly note. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993, and no amount of Beltway jabber and finagling will produce any substantive hike in it soon, or quite possibly ever again. The federal gas tax trust fund was poised to land about $4.3 billion in the red by last month's end, but as Logistics Management reports, Congress threw the troubled account a one-year life preserver of $8 billion from the U.S. Treasury General Fund.
State gas taxes, which often support state bonding for transportation projects, are losing buying power, too. Oklahoma's road and bridge bonds are getting pricier because of tighter credit. Connecticut couldn't find a refinancing deal for highly-rated transportation project bonds worth nearly half a billion dollars, a never-before challenge for a state with serious surface transportation needs. Syndicated columnist Neil Pierce writes in the Seattle Times, "The Wall Street fiscal crisis effectively shut the state-local government sector out of borrowing." Well before that storm hit, state transportation project budgets had already been smacked by sharply rising costs for construction materials and equipment fuel, plus a tightening global labor market. India, China and other fast-developing nations are on a global road building binge.
It's true that a proposed U.S. infrastructure bank could raise some $60 billion over 10 years for deserving projects. That'd be a start, but as Congressional Quarterly reports, the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission in a major report issued earlier this year said $225 billion per annum is needed for the next 50 years for repairs and upgrades to meet future needs. That's $12.5 trillion. The commission noted that current expenditures are less than 40 percent of their recommended yearly nut, and that future funding will need to be closely tied to cost-benefit analyses and performance-based outcomes. Expect some major wrangling next year when the new Congress takes up reauthorization of the surface transportation bill, which is rather hopefully named the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient, Transportation Equity Act, a Legacy for Users - or one by the American Society of Civil Engineers that just to get moving on vital projects, the nation's infrastructure needs an infusion of $1.6 trillion over the next five years.
A promising development, as much or more for its cost-saving peak-hour rationing incentives as for its revenue-raising potential - is variable-fee highway tolling - now spreading across the U.S., often in so-called HOT lanes. A HOT lane pilot project is underway on SR 167 in Puget Sound, and a federal grant to help fund the SR 520 bridge replacement requires state legislative approval of pricing on 520.
Whether or not Puget Sound decides to move toward regional variable-fee highway tolling, there's another important tool we're going to be hearing more about: public-private partnerships, or P3s, which help share taxpayer risk and dramatically speed up project delivery. They're not a solution for every occasion, but deserve leeway to support more of our region's and nation's staggering surface infrastructure needs. P3s are widespread in Europe, Canada and Australia, and now beginning to gather steam stateside.
P3s need not involve the sale of public assets such as highways and bridges or transit systems, but rather the leasing of such facilities, which then yield toll or fare revenue for the private operators. These operators are not reviled foreign sovereign concerns but either transit service firms, or special "private" infrastructure investment groups which may be headquartered in Europe or Australia, but are increasingly bankrolled by U.S. public employee union pension funds or those of building trades unions. Those funds have lost some value in their stock portfolios lately, but they're still flush and see infrastructure as good risk diversification for their long-term obligations to pensioners.
The Washington State Investment Board, representing a slew of state employee retirement funds, plans to invest 5 percent of its sizeable portfolio in infrastructure. The board explains here (p. 2) that it has come to view "tangible asset types" (other than real estate and) including infrastructure as capable of producing "long-term" and "high-quality" revenue streams. A number of others public employee union pension funds in North America have invested in infrastructure, and more have announced similar plans.
They tend to go with the private infrastructure investment groups because directly buying state highway bonds doesn't meet their fiduciary duties to pensioners. Interest earnings on state bonds are tax-exempt, so interest rates are correspondingly a bit lower. Yet public pension funds are already granted a tax exemption on interest earned, so unlike individual investors they have no financial incentive to go for the state bonds. In fact, they have a disincentive, as Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation explains.
For the WSIB and most other public-employee pension fund managers, investing in privately-held companies is simply a part of smart portfolio diversification and risk management. As of last year, WSIB had already earned $9.7 billion in private equity profits since 1981 and had one-seventh of its portfolio in private equity.
Can P3 investments that are paid off in toll revenue still prove viable as worries persist about gas prices and road travel volume? In a word, yes. Travelers value their time most of all; private vehicles are usually more direct, flexible and faster than transit; and tolls for managed lanes guaranteed to maintain traffic flow of 45 mph or higher yield a valued benefit, like housing, utilities and groceries. This perspective cuts across income levels. UCLA and USC researchers in a case study released this year found a sizable percentage of lower-income drivers used HOT lanes and that it was less regressive in terms of tax policy for them to pay related tolls versus sales taxes for transportation projects.
Fears tend to be overblown about runaway toll rates to cover P3 finance costs and profit margins. Governments retain control over P3 toll rates and transit fares. The contracts between private partners and governments are long-term, usually 35 years or more. That's plenty of time to make the margins. In the meantime, P3s deliver transportation projects sooner rather than later or not at all, thus providing quantifiable economic benefits that are rarely counted by critics.
A slew of P3s and traditional-procurement projects studied by The University of Melbourne showed the P3s were up to 30.8 percent more cost-efficient from inception; that cost overruns were nearly non-existent for P3s; that they were completed faster, even when large; were far more transparent; and their benefits tended to be underestimated because the hefty value to the public of quicker project completion and integrated professional management aren't part of the present calculus.
Cal Marsella, the Executive Director of Denver's Regional Transportation District, which is now pursuing a P3 bid process (and, yes, perhaps a small sales tax hike) to complete an over-budget regional light rail program within the original timeline, states in this presentation that P3s can save 10 to 25 percent in the design-build phase and 10 to 30 percent in the course of operations and maintenance.
This approach to P3s emphasizes bundling of design, construction, operations and maintenance services provided by private consortiums of industry-leading transportation firms. The payments occur over time and can be pegged to strict contractual performance standards. Exemplified in British Columbia, it's a strategy well-suited to controlling cost overruns during construction, meeting construction deadlines, limiting operations and maintenance costs after project delivery, and ensuring good service. Partnerships BC has employed design-build-operate P3 contracts, os some variation thereof, to construct a new rapid rail line to the airport and the suburban center of Richmond, to rebuild the treacherous road north to Whistler before the 2010 Winter Olympics, and to develop an electronically-tolled bridge across the Fraser River in Vancouver's east suburbs.
The American Public Transit Association in a white paper on public transit P3s says they're no silver bullet but need to be encouraged as part of the financing mix and as a good management tool. Europe, Asia, Australia and South America are far ahead of the U.S. in implementing public transit P3s, APTA says, although Houston, the Bay Area and Denver are highlighting the approach. Private investment in transit-oriented development is a related tack and should be encouraged, according to APTA, by working with developers to learn their needs and by encouraging value-capture strategies pegged to new development around transit stations. To facilitate broader consideration of highway and transit P3s, APTA's P3 task force has drafted model legislation for state governments to consider.
Another organization, the National Council For Public-Private Partnerships, holds a special conference this week on transit P3s, including officials from the regions of Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas and Charlotte, as well as federal figures and private firms.
BTS data show that since 1960, the number of passenger vehicles in use globally has about quadrupled, while the U.S. share of that total has decreased more than five-fold. Global commercial truck population is five times greater over the same period, with the U.S. share holding steady at less than a third.
However, in the U.S. we tend to drive longer distances and use a disproportionate share of available fossil fuels. The holy grail in the auto industry is substitution of renewable-source electricity for fossil fuels, in "flex-fuel" plug-in hybrid cars. The vision is that they'll be able to run not only on clean electricity (itself a major undertaking) but also net-green second generation bio-fuels which don't require acres of food-producing farmland to grow.
GM, Toyota, Ford and Chrysler are among the automakers focused on bringing plug-in electric flex-fuel hybrids to market in the next few years, with lithium ion battery packs. Those haven't been fully debugged yet, but engineering teams are working hard to do so. Congress has passed a tax exemption of up to $7,500 per vehicle for plug-in buyers, and large government and corporate fleet purchases would allow manufacturers to scale up production for the masses.
There are still reasons environmental and financial to try to engineer boundaries on growth of vehicle miles travelled. A good framework was provided last month in Redmond by Microsoft's Chief Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard at Cascadia Center's "Beyond Oil: Transforming Transportation" conference. (TVW video of Bernard and full transcript of his remarks here).
Bernard set out a hierarchy of descending transportation preferences that he calls "zero miles, shared miles and efficient miles." The first priority entails schedule-juggling and trip avoidance through tele-work from home, with small meetings as needed in locales near workers' home bases. More than a few Microsoft employees have discovered they can meet near home at a coffee shop rather driving to Redmond, Bernard said. An astounding 40 percent of the workforce at British Telecom (a Microsoft client) work from home regularly, Bernard said.
With current virtual conferencing tools, and an emphasis on "deliverables" from tele-workers, many other employers - albeit not those in fields such as manufacturing, construction and retail - could raise their percentage of tele-workers. One wonders: To further reduce congestion and vehicle miles travelled, what about more "distance learning" in public education? It need not be the domain largely of older students. A federally-funded report looked at a range of studies on distance learning programs in grades six through twelve and found they were as effective as classroom instruction (see p. 16, here).
"Shared miles" would cover public transit but at present, transit routes here just aren't convenient for that many people, said Bernard. He evangelized for an alternative of matching ride-sharers on the fly through smart carpooling, using networked real-time data on the shifting locations and schedules of riders. The same basic principles could help better consolidate freight shipments, said Bernard.
"Efficient miles" entail alternative fuel breakthroughs, and more of the real-time traffic data purveyed by companies such as the Microsoft spin-off Inrix, of Kirkland, to help drivers optimize routes and departure times.
As far as behavior change around driving, there's a long way to go. If we were constantly reminded of the cost to the infrastructure every time we used it, would that change our actions enough to make a difference, a "zero miles more often" difference? It's not unimaginable.
For surface transportation funding, the federal teat is running dry. States and especially regions will shoulder the brunt in coming decades as we try to catch up before the rising tide of population threatens to overwhelms us. So we're going to have to do a few things differently. We can start sooner, or we can start later. But the longer we wait, the higher the price.
"We must respond to the reality that the gas tax, the traditional source of revenue for transportation investments at both the state and federal level, is not expected to keep pace with transportation needs in the future."
We moderated a panel on "Options Beyond the Gas Tax." An edited text of our remarks follows.
* * *
A modest boost in the federal gas tax - and only a modest increase has a chance of passing muster with the congressional tax writing committees and obtaining a filibuster-proof majority support in the Senate - will be consumed by ever-growing demands for maintenance and preservation of the Interstate system and other parts of the highway network. It will leave little revenue to invest in new facilities. The federal program contributes only about 40-50 percent toward the capital cost of transportation infrastructure. The remaining 50-60 percent has traditionally come from state and local budgets. There is no guarantee that states will be able to meet their part of the bargain through local tax increases - be it gas or sales tax.
States will be obliged to look for new sources of capital. Where will the money come from? At this point in time the credit markets are virtually frozen. But these conditions will not last forever. Eventually, liquidity in the banking system will be restored and infrastructure asset financing will resume, albeit on more conservative terms.
Transportation Funding Needs Likely To Exceed Bonding Capacity
Many states will be foreclosed from borrowing funds in the municipal bond market because they will run into a statutory debt ceiling or because of citizen opposition to further bond indebtedness. At the very least, borrowing in the municipal bond market will become more costly. Even after the market returns to more normal conditions, the cost of borrowing will rise because the structured-finance instruments that formerly made borrowing less costly, will be replaced by the more expensive old fashioned fixed-rate bonds. On top of that, the sheer magnitude of the need for new infrastructure is likely to overwhelm the bonding capacity of most state and local governments.
A purely federal-centric approach - be it a gas tax increase or a federal capital budget, or even a combination of both - cannot by themselves make up for decades of under-investment and meet future demands for increased transportation capacity.
Hybrid Funding Model To Emerge
What we are likely to end up with instead is a hybrid funding approach. Part of it will be a modest increase in the federal gas tax. Another part may involve some kind of a new federal financing initiative - most likely a National Infrastructure Bank. But this will still leave a major portion of future additions to road capacity to be financed by toll revenue and the private sector. Private investment will most likely take the form of project-based private toll concessions. In New York State, the new Tappan Zee Bridge would be a prime candidate for such a concession.
Congressional Concerns On P3s Can Be Met
There has been some speculation that private concessions might run into opposition on Capitol Hill when the federal surface transportation program comes up for a new authorization next year. But recent statements by Congressman Peter DeFazio(D-4th, Ore.), chairman of the influential House Highways and Transit Subcommittee, suggest that congressional lawmakers will not object to private toll concessions for new projects so long as PPP agreements contain adequate safeguards to protect the public interest. These safeguards could involve a cap on toll increases (or on the rate of return), prohibition on noncompete clauses, revenue sharing requirements, recapture of excess profits, prohibition against diversion of funds and limits on length of concession agreements.
While the age of highly leveraged deals such as the Indiana Toll Road concession may be over, there are still billions of dollars in domestic and foreign infrastructure funds waiting to be invested in transportation facilities. Toll roads appeal to long-term investors such as pension funds because they generate strong demand even in times of slower economic growth and produce steady and predictable cash flow relatively unaffected by economic downturns. And pension funds require stable, income-oriented investments to match their long-term liabilities and payout obligations.
Given the current volatility of the equities market, the low interest rates of the government bond market and the risky nature of investments in corporate credit instruments and real estate, infrastructure is now seen as a "safe haven" for long-term investors, a senior bank official told us. Financial News calls it "a rare bright spot in a tumultous market."
Again, I am aware of the current decline in toll revenue (caused by reduced VMTs) which makes investment in toll facilities less attractive, but I consider this a cyclical phenomenon tied to a recessionary economy. In the long run, toll roads have lost none of their revenue earning potential.
Vehicle Mileage Tax Eyed, In Long-Term German Precedent - Trucks
In the long-term, we must find the means not just to supplement the gasoline tax but to replace it with a more stable source of revenue. The most likely candidate appears to be a mileage tax (VMT fee), i.e. a fee based on trip length and possibly vehicle size and weight. Such a revenue system would reflect more closely the actual usage of the road system and would not rely on taxing a commodity whose use we are actually trying to discourage. It is possible that a VMT fee will be phased in progressively, with commercial trucks being the first to be subject to it. With many trucking concerns already using the Global Positioning System to monitor and track their trucks’ movements, a mileage fee for commercial trucks could be introduced relatively quickly and with fewer complications.
Precedent for truck VMT fees already exists. A satellite-based mileage fee system for heavy trucks, called TollCollect, has been operating successfully in Germany since January 2005. There are currently 640,000 vehicles equipped with TollCollect transponders. Last year they generated $5.15 billion in fees. But a mileage-based revenue system in this country is for the long term. Estimates range between 10 and 25 years before a VMT tax is fully tested and ready to be implemented nationwide. In the meantime, we must devise other ways to supplement the inadequate stream of revenues from the gas tax.
We've now got a full transcript (at bottom, here) of the address given by Microsoft's Chief Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard last month at Cascadia Center's "Beyond Oil: Transforming Transportation" conference. Stressing the growing potential of information technology to shape decisions about commuting and travel, Bernard outlined what might be called a hierarchy of mobility preferences. Or, as he put it, the best miles are zero miles, followed by shared miles and then efficient miles.
So, zero miles....how do I leverage the information in my calendar to keep me from coming to the office? Because if I can stay home I can get a lot of work done. So by literally looking at the blocks of time, and there’s color-coding options within Outlook that I use as well, you can say, hey, look, within this calendar, if (you) just move around a few meetings, or make them tele-presence meetings, (you've) got an opportunity to work from home two, two-and-a-half days a week right off the top. Now, we do a lot of work with BT (British Telecom), out of the UK. BT has taken the idea of calendaring and moved to the idea of meeting-free days and moved on to the next level. Forty percent - 40 percent - of their workforce does not go to the office. Forty percent of their workforce works at home.
Microsoft has also started its own employee transit service, the Microsoft Connector, so that employee travel miles can be shared, and environmental impact and traffic congestion reduced. Bernard (pictured, right) explained:
.....we’re all familiar with the paradigm of mass transit. I take a bus, I take a subway, Seattle’s light rail, all these things are great, but they’re only great if you live close to ....a pick-up and a drop-off. This is really difficult. Like in my case I’d actually have to take three buses to get to Microsoft from my house, and it would take me about an hour-and-a-half to get here. So it’s great, and the vision is, get lots of bus and lots of mass transit and get lots of people off the road. But that model only works so well, because lots of people like me don’t have a direct line, so the convenience trade-off does not work.
...one thing we did a as a corporation is, we said, wait a second. We have lots of centers of population who are disconnected, that can’t really take mass transit effectively to get to work, but are actually on the road every day. So we actually rolled out, last year about this time the (Microsoft) Connector buses. People have seen them around, I’m sure, the buses are all over. We did it for about four months as a trial and it was so successful that we doubled the fleet.....you go online and reserve your (seat), you get on the bus, and what’s great is, it’s not only convenient, it’s wired. So I can actually do work while I’m going to and from work...Today we are now saving....250,000 car miles every single week in the Puget Sound area thanks to the Connector system, which is...pretty impressive....And we think that that number is going to increase. As gas prices have increased, ridership has increased and we’re looking at having more routes and more people.
Microsoft subsequently announced an expansion of its Connector service, which was to have taken effect yesterday. But what about employers lacking the company's vast resources? More efficient and flexible ride-sharing is an alternative to traditional, static-schedule carpooling, said Bernard.
"....the problem with rideshare is it’s a great concept, but unless you have a static job, which says I’m going to be coming and going at these exact times, and everybody else in my carpool is the same, it doesn’t work because it doesn’t take into account the dynamic reality of life...So Microsoft researched, and...we said, what do we do to actually take this concept that I talked about earlier of calendaring, geographical information and presence, and put these things together and say, wait a second, what if we use smart carpooling, or smart-pooling, and said, look, we can look at everybody’s calendar who signs up for the program, and we can find and accept matches, based on a schedule? So today if I happen to be leaving at 3:30, great, who else is leaving at 3:30 who lives in my zip code?
Now all of a sudden I start to have a dynamic processing system that says I’m going to match you on the fly (with) other people who have a similar schedule and geographic location. You can have different riders in both directions, and you can reschedule, so I’ll see that a meeting comes up and I’ll say, oh, I’m going to take that meeting at 3:30, I’m now leaving at 4:30. System needs to go in and change who my riding partners are. So we’re experimenting with this at Microsoft, we believe that this will be the wave of the future. We’re getting people to carpool. Car-pooling is a great concept but it really doesn’t work at scale today.
Microsoft sponsored a global student competition on transportation applications of software, and one entry was a real eye-opener, said Bernard.
...there’s a team out of New Zealand that has created and looked at this thing that’s basically a taxi bus and what it does is it says based on your presence and your information in the city of Christchurch, they have a bunch of vans and a bunch of drivers, and they use route optimization and they were basically able to get wait times...down to about...two minutes...from seven minutes. Down to two minutes in a major city. Very cool stuff. So we’re working to see how can we take this and apply it to other cities.
Efficient miles result not only from the peak-hour congestion pricing in managed lanes, something Cascadia Center has long advocated and which is now gaining steam in Central Puget Sound and nationwide. Efficient miles also result from the use of congestion-avoidance technology. Bernard:
...there’s a new service on our maps, it’s based on a technology called Clear Flow, which says, actually give me a route, based on traffic. And as you can see, this map has actually been re-routed based on the dynamic information that’s happening in real time. This type of information should be and will be in cars in the future, so that your routes can recalculate, not just based on theoretical, but based on actual data. Now, it becomes even more interesting, and this is where Microsoft research is looking at it...if I gather this data over time, and we’ve been doing this in Seattle, I can predict, with high accuracy, what the road will look like in 15, 30, 45, 60 minutes....each of those dots tell me different types of things....there’s a grey dot with green in it...telling me...in about 15 minutes (Interstate 405 north) is going to be jammed up. So if you’re actually going to get through 405, you’d better leave now, or expect a delay....we’ve been working on this algorithm quite a bit...it is highly accurate and getting better as we get more data.
Of course, other companies and independent software developers are involved in the push to green the daily commute. But by concentrating some of its considerable resources on a whole set of tools to improve surface transportation, Microsoft adds considerable forward momentum. The questions for employers, commuters and service providers who stand to benefit, are: how soon, how broadly, at what cost, and with what degree of user-friendliness will next-generation commuting and telecommuting software applications become available?
Read the whole Bernard transcript. And courtesy of TVW, Washington state's public affairs cable channel, view video of Bernard and all of the other Day Two "Beyond Oil" speakers, including former CIA chief James Woolsey and Better Place CEO Agassi, here.
The Everett Herald reports today that Horizon Airlines has made an official announcement that it wants to operate daily flights from Paine Field in Snohomish County, north of Seattle, to Portland and Spokane. Commercial air passengers going to or from Snohomish County at present have virtually no other option but to travel some 50-plus miles between the county and Sea-Tac Airport on congested Interstate 5.
The county is anchored by the city of Everett, famous for its Boeing manufacturing plant adjacent to Paine Field (pictured, below). But the county economy has diversified and grown, both in employment, population, traffic congestion and housing construction. Data from the state's Office Of Financial Management show April, 2008 population of Snohomish County is 696,600; its two sister counties in Central Puget Sound are King (1.88 million) and Pierce (805,400). State DOT data (third map from top, here) show by 2030 Snohomish's population is projected to grow to 968,841, King's to 2.18 million, and Pierce's to 982,230.
This growth rate suggests the need to closely consider use of existing airports such as Paine - with runways ready for commercial planes; and to revisit the even thornier issue of a new regional airport, as well. That quest seems all but inevitable, again, concluded the Seattle Times in an editorial yesterday.
More on the Horizon news from The Herald.
Horizon, which is owned by Alaska Airlines, wants to launch daily flights before next summer, likely to Portland and Spokane. The decision comes after a 6-0 vote last month by the Everett City Council in favor of a resolution supporting scheduled commercial flights at Paine Field....The Port of Everett recently approved a resolution that stops short of calling for commercial air service, but does urge the county not do anything that would hurt federal funding at the airport because it is used by the Boeing Co.
Horizon said it is considering flights that would aid same day business trips. Passengers could also use the service to connect in Portland with other destinations, bypassing Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. “Rather than suffer on the I-5 slog or endure tedious hours on I-90, Snohomish County residents would be able to travel between these Northwest regions much more quickly with Horizon Air from Paine Field," said Dan Russo, Horizon’s vice president of marketing and communications.
It's not a done deal yet, but it marks a real turning point in the long and often contentious dialog over the possibility of commercial flights at Paine. Horizon had in 1998 considered flights but backed off. Earlier this year Allegiant Air - which flies out of Bellingham, had mused publicly about Paine operations. The community response gave pause, but as Seattle Times' aerospace writer Dominic Gates reports this afternoon, Allegiant is still investigating the Paine option. Still, no carrier had clearly stepped up to say, "Okay, let's move forward" at Paine Field. Until now.
In a statement, Horizon stressed that low-noise aircraft would be used if its Paine plan takes off.
Mindful of community concerns, Horizon would operate the flights with its 76-seat Bombardier Q400 high-speed turboprops, among the quietest commercial aircraft in the world today. This neighborhood-friendly aircraft is 10 decibels quieter than a similar-size jet and more than 20 decibels quieter than an MD-80 jet. Even city center airports where stringent noise limitations are in effect – such as those in London and Toronto – have accepted Q400 flights. The Q400 is also among the most environmentally friendly aircraft today, burning 30 percent less fuel and producing 30 percent lower emissions than a similar-size jet.
The airline does have a caveat: facility lease and ground operations terms would have to pencil out.
The airport has three paved runways and covers about 1,300 acres.
Working with federal, state and regional partners, the Harris County Tollway Authority this fall will begin the final stages of implementing a plan for a total of four fully-operational High Occupancy and Toll (HOT) lanes, on both sides of a 12-mile stretch of the I-10 Katy Expressway. The highway section runs between central Houston and points west. The current, single, reversible carpool and transit, or HOV lane will make way for two managed HOT lanes in each direction. As is the case in all new tolling projects now, tolls will be assessed automatically, as traffic flows, without old-school tollbooths. Overhead gantries will electronically read transponders in vehicle windshields which are registered to drivers' accounts.
The $2.8 billion project includes additional general use, or free, lanes, and was expected to take 10 years to finish after construction started in 2003. But it's now nearing completion after just five years thanks to a $500 million stake contributed by the county tollway authority, based on anticipated HOT lane revenues.
Until next spring, the new HOT lanes will be open only to transit, motorcycles and "HOV2+" vehicles; then Harris County commissioners will likely set "dynamic tolling" rates allowing single-occupant vehicles to use the managed lanes during off-peak, and probably peak hours as well. Tolls for those drivers will vary according to lane usage levels and congestion; transit, motorcycles and high occupancy vehicles will continue to use the lanes for free.
The goal will be to set prices for the solo drivers at a rate that keeps HOT lane traffic flowing no slower than 45 mph. I-10 runs 2,460 miles from Jacksonville, Fla. to Santa Monica, Calif., passing through New Orleans, Houston (pictured above, left), San Antonio and Phoenix along the way. The I-10 Katy Expressway HOT lane project in Houston is part of a larger regional mobility plan which includes more HOT lanes, and, it is hoped, a dramatic expansion of transit options including light rail, commuter rail, bus rapid transit, multi-modal transit centers and park-and-ride facilities. Some funding challenges have been evident in the transit plan, though.
In this slideshow, the Houston regional transit agency Metro details the supplemental HOT lane plan it is shopping to the community now. The proposal is to convert the single HOV lane in each of five highway corridors to a single HOT lane with minimum speeds of 50 mph. The corridors are IH 45, north and southbound, U.S. 59 north and southbound, and Interstate 290 - which currently has a reversible HOV lane.
With strikingly affordable housing, a vibrant economy driven by the energy and medical industries, plus a major port, Houston is poised for continued growth, even in the wake of Hurricane Ike. Another one million residents are expected by 2015 and another 3 million by 2035. The current Houston region population is 5.5 million.
Variably-priced HOT lanes - free to carpoolers and transit and open for a cost to solo drivers - are already spreading in the West Coast Corridor, from San Diego and Orange County, Calif. to metro Los Angeles. Managed lanes with variable fees for solo drivers already have a foothold here in metro Puget Sound and are increasingly likely to play a role in the big Columbia River Crossing project linking Portland, Ore. with Washington state.
A lot has happened since the Redmond, Wash. "Beyond Oil: Transforming Transportation" conference earlier this month on electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which was sponsored by Cascadia Center, Microsoft, Idaho National Laboratory (INL), WSDOT, USDOT and Pemco Insurance. For starters, Time Magazine's environmental correspondent Bryan Walsh, who attended both days of the event and interviewed key sources there, has published an important article titled, "Is America Ready To Drive Electric?" Walsh writes:
If plug-ins suddenly became popular, before the grid had a chance to get smarter, it could lead to a real power predicament...A...solution: tap into the enormous extra capacity of the grid during off-peak times, like between midnight and dawn...To do that, however, we need to persuade plug-in owners to recharge ....late at night, when demand is low....to make that system work, utilities will need to install smart meters in customers' homes capable of monitoring when cars are charging, and then...price the juice accordingly; smart meters are already being tested out by utilities in California and Texas. These changes would also help utilities even out the peaks and valleys that come with providing power. "The hope is that we'll be able to actively regulate our grid to improve efficiency," says Brian Wynne, president of the D.C.-based Electric Drive Transportation Association. "There is tremendous potential."
A shift to plug-in cars could also help the development of renewable power...While a power grid fueled by solar or wind would be clean...it would also be intermittent...But if millions of electric cars were plugged into the grid, they could act as mini-batteries, storing renewable electricity as it's generated — and eventually even channeling electricity back into grid during cloudy or windless days, a system called vehicle-to-grid. "If you have control over renewable power resources and plug-ins, you can start to synchronize the two," says John Clark, CEO of V2Green, a Seattle start-up that is looking to integrate the grid and plug-in vehicles, and which has already begun field trials with utilities in Austin, Texas. "To utilities, electric cars can become batteries on wheels."
Clark (pictured, above right) shared additional details at Cascadia's "Beyond Oil" conference; his PowerPoint is the fourth from the top under "Thursday September 4th Presentations," here. V2Green's big idea has been steadily gaining notice, and just this week they've been bought by GridPoint of Arlington, Va. Seattle Times business reporter Angel Gonzalez writes:
The sale of V2Green, one of the region's most promising clean-technology companies, comes as electric vehicles seem to be gaining momentum as an alternative to fossil fuel-powered vehicles....The acquisition by GridPoint comes early in the life of V2Green, which was founded in late 2006 by former Microsoft executive David Kaplan. Chief Executive John Clark said the buyer is "an incredibly well-capitalized group on a mission that's very similar to ours. ...We can spend time out there trying to raise money or we can partner up. In this climate, having a lot of dry powder is not a bad thing," Clark said.
More here on V2Green from MSNBC's science editor Alan Boyle, who also attended "Beyond Oil," and later rode with Clark and the City of Seattle's Rich Feldman in a city-owned Prius converted to a plug-in as part of pilot project which, according to INL's Michael Hagood, Cascadia Center played a key role in facilitating.
All good, but what about automakers? How interested are they in electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles? In a word, very. Their survival depends on a new generation of leaner, greener vehicles, especially electrics, and plug-in hybrids that can run on electricity and liquid fuels. These must eventually include the second-generation biofuels now under development, derived from sources such as algae and byproducts of forestry and agriculture.
Chrysler To Develop Plug-in Hybrid Mini-van and Jeep Wrangler
None of this will be a slam dunk, either for manufacturers or consumers. Plug-in hybrids are going to cost somewhere between $30,000 and $45,000 at the outset, ballpark. The long-term cost savings on fuel and maintenance still make that a smart investment, but the price point could still be a stumbling block for some. The U.S. Senate this week passed legislation including a $7,500 tax credit for plug-in buyers; the House is to take up a similar energy measure before this Friday's currently-scheduled recess.
Another issue: the answers aren't all in yet on developing lithium ion batteries needed for plug-ins. Representing what they say is a small but crucial part of overall plug-in vehicle development costs, automakers are lobbying Congress to actually fund $25 billion in loans for R&D work on plug-ins, authorized in an earlier energy bill. (UPDATE, 9/25/08: The U.S. House has approved the loans and the Senate is expected to follow).
Plenty for free-marketeers and corporate critics to choke on there. But as Time's Walsh notes:
...even with infrastructure improvements, the shift to electric cars is likely to take years, even decades. According to Alan Madian, a director at the research firm LECG, even assuming solid growth, we can't expect more than 68 million plug-in hybrids by 2036, which would account for less than 17% of the total estimated fleet at that time. Given that the U.S. car fleet is likely to have grown to over 400 million vehicles by then, we may still end up using more oil in the future than we do today in a business as usual scenario. That's all the more reason for the government to get ahead of the curve and begin piecing together the electric infrastructure — smart meters, public charging points, more renewable power — that will speed the adoption of plug-ins. "A car affects the world more than anything else a buyer will purchase in his or her lifetime," says Felix Kramer, founder of the California Cars Initiative, a plug-in advocacy group in Palo Alto, Calif. Plug-ins can turn the car from a force for environmental destruction to something that frees us from oil — but only if we make it happen.
More public transit, employer transit, smart-networked ride-sharing, and telecommuting, plus smart-networked shipping that maximizes use of all available cargo space on long-haul freight trucks will be crucial if surface transportation is to limit its environmental footprint, and road congestion is to be controlled as population and employment grow. Exponential improvements to the country's freight rail and inter-city passenger rail networks are also key.
Nonetheless, the nation's vehicle fleet will remain vast, and so the need for clean electric vehicle fuel and net-green biofuels will only grow. What and how we drive will become vastly different, the only question is how soon and how thoroughly.
With funding from the Washington State Department of Transportation and advice from 75 employers, the Kitsap Regional Coordinating Council will develop common standards for telework. Derek Sheppard of the Kitsap Sun has more:
Often, the idea of telework comes with some reservations. Will companies and employees miss out on the spontaneous creativity that trickles down next to the water cooler? What about slackers? Who will middle managers manage if there's no one around? The focus, (Poulsbo City Council Member and telework advocate Ed) Stern said, is finding the right employees who can produce "deliverables," so there's a definable product they can show for their time at home. And the idea isn't proposing wholesale abandonment of a company's workplace.
Stern hopes the employers who participate commit to allowing select workers at least one day at home every two weeks. Companies should think about the benefits of allowing certain employees to work from home, Stern said. It allows workforce expansion without additional office space, results in better employee retention, reduces congestion and carbon emissions and gives workers more time with their families.
....Bruce Agnew, Director of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center said telework is experiencing a resurgence of interest, and can be part of a larger effort to reduce traffic and carbon emissions that includes effective mass transit, peak-hour tolls and ride-sharing....The state's aggressive effort to reduce greenhouse gases could help explain the renewed interest in telework, he said. "The quickest way to do that is eliminate a day or two of commuting to work," he said.
Stern is right on the money in highlighting "deliverables." If teleworkers can deliver documented, valuable work product laboring from their domiciles or other off-site locations, employers should welcome the results, and the considerable benefit to the employee.
Telework can be a powerful tool for employee retention.
A crowd of 500 key influencers from the private sector, government, academia and the media filled Microsoft's large meeting facility in Redmond for the Sept. 4-5 conference organized by Discovery Institute's Cascadia Center, "Beyond Oil: Transforming Transportation." Gripping presentations by former CIA Director James Woolsey, electric car systems entrepreneur Shai Agassi of Better Place (pictured, left), and Microsoft's sustainability guru Rob Bernard - plus groundbreaking vehicles on display, dozens of other great speakers and several high-level technical workshops - built a heady buzz and energized networking.
Among the take-aways:
U.S. national security is badly compromised by our dependence on foreign oil - we need to develop an even greater sense of urgency around breaking the habit.
Electricity and the second-generation bio-fuels now under development will have the ability to revolutionize transportation. Renewable energy sources must be fostered to make sure clean electric transportation can become a reality nationwide. Even so, electric engines represent an immediate improvement in tailpipe emissions.
Cleaner, greener vehicles will still need infrastructure. A new transportation funding paradigm for roadway, bridge and transit projects is emerging, as the gas tax falls into permanent decline. More of the slack will be taken up, over time, through tolling revenue from variably-priced high occupancy and toll (HOT) lanes. These are free to multi-passenger vehicles and transit, and available to solo drivers for a cost, which varies according to real-time congestion.
As vehicle engine technology advances, so will traffic navigational tools and alternative transport strategies. Among large employers, Microsoft leads the way with innovations including its WiFi-equipped "Connector" commuter bus and van service for employees. The company's "LiveMaps" technology illustrates how real-time road data can be transmitted to help choose optimal commuting windows. Meanwhile, a host of other technology companies are working on initiatives which before too long will allow every new car to become a moving computer, transmitting and receiving roadway data to manage the challenge of metro region mobility.
To drill down further, check out the speaker PowerPoints, all of which are linked to on this page.
"Beyond Oil" drew media coverage from a wide variety of outlets including major metro daily newspapers, talk radio, public affairs TV, industry journals, newspaper blogs and independent blogs. The conference also served as a focus for several Cascadia op-eds, in the Puget Sound Business Journal and Everett Herald. Links follow, and will be updated as additional pieces appear.
"Beyond Oil" Media Coverage, During And After The Event Last updated 9/19/08.
"Powering The Carbon-free Grid: Sun, Wind, Water, Waves, Atoms And Conservation," TVW (Washington state's public affairs TV channel), 9/17/08. Panelists are: Jim Walker, American Wind Energy Assn.; Paul Genoa, Nuclear Energy Institute; Kevin Bannister, Oregon Wave Energy Trust; Rich Lauckhart, Ventyx Energy Advisors; Jim Piro, Portland General Electric.
"Transforming Transportation Globally,' Shai Agassi, Better Place (Sept. 5 luncheon keynote address), TVW, 9/16/08. Introduction by Tom Alberg, Madrona Venture Group.
"Future Of Transportation, Funding and Climate Change," TVW, 9/12/08. Slade Gorton, National Transportation Policy Project; Paul Brubaker, USDOT's Research & Innovative Technology Administration; David Kaplan, V2Green; WSDOT Sec. Paula Hammond; Bill Rogers, Idaho National Laboratory; Neil Schuster, American Assn. of Motor Vehicles Administrators. Preceded by a presentation from Admiral Dennis Blair, Securing America's Future Energy.
Rob Bernard Video: "The Road Ahead," TVW, 9/11/08. Microsoft's chief environmental strategist talks transportation, technology and environment. Preceded by Don Foley's update on national "X Prize" car rally, King County Executive Ron Sims, and welcoming remarks from Discovery Institute's President Bruce Chapman.
James Woolsey Video: "The Case For Change", TVW, 9/9/08. Former CIA Director Woolsey solo, with introduction from U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert; then joined by Chelsea Sexton, K.C. Golden; and followed by Peter Jackson.
It makes sense for the people who use facilities the most to pay a greater share of the construction and maintenance costs for a specific facility or geographic area....comprehensive regional tolling - with e-tags and other solutions to help make it easy logistically - makes good economic sense so long as we have a real action plan....
