Tolls Are Here to Stay in Many Parts of the U.S.

In many parts of the country, highway and bridge tolls are a way of life. If you want to use the interstate to drive from Baltimore to Philadelphia, you pay $20 in tolls. In Houston, if you use the new multi-lane beltway around the city and the new freeway to Dallas, you pay a toll. Basically, if you want to go faster without the customary delays that we experience in the Puget Sound area, you desposit a couple of bucks.

In the Bay Area, there are six major bridges linking San Francisco and surrounding cities. Regardless of what bridge you take, you pay the same toll. Tolls are used to maintain, replace and build roads and bridges for commuters. In the Bay Area, drivers still have the same congestion we experience in Seattle-Tacoma-Everett, but building highways and bridges around large bodies of water is much more costly, so the state's funding choices are limited. Unlike Houston, where the ground is flat and the city is spread out.

So what is the lesson for Washington?

Consider making tolls permanent. In the 1950s when Washington voters finally approved the SR520 bridge across Lake Washington, the Hood Canal Floating Bridge and the five-mile structure over the Columbia connecting Astoria and the Washington shore, tolls were levied only to disappear when the construction bonds were retired in the late 1990s. Voters made no provisions for expansion and reconstruction. Therefore, tolls on the Lake Washington floating bridge connecting the University of Washington with Kirkland disappeared in the 1980s and now finding the funds to replace it are as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack.

Don C. Brunell, President