Chris Sullivan: WSDOT Lynnwood to Tacoma express toll system coming

More toll lanes are coming with the passage of the Legislature’s biennial transportation budget this past weekend.

KIRO Radio traffic and transportation guru Chris Sullivan, who covered the new spending plan on his Chokepoints page, sat down with the Dori Monson Show to break down the $9.8 billion package.

“Let’s face it, these projects need to get done,” Sullivan said. “A lot of the work needs to get done to provide some congestion relief to people. They’re going to be widening lanes, adding lanes.”

More tolls in the future

However, not all of these added lanes will be free. Funding will go toward adding lanes to I-405 between Lynnwood and Bothell, and between Bellevue and Renton, but these will be toll lanes.

RELATED: Bonding against WSDOT tolls forces WSDOT to keep congestion

This is despite the fact that the 405 toll lanes between Lynnwood and Bellevue were originally supposed to be a pilot project that would only stay permanently in place if they could both make enough revenue to cover operating expenses, and operate at a minimum speed of 45 miles per hour 90 percent of the time.

The lanes do indeed pay for themselves, but they currently operate at that 45 miles per hour or more about 81 percent of the time, according to the Washington Policy Center. However, the state later amended its language in the recently-passed Senate Bill 5825 so that only one of the two original requirements was necessary to keep the tolls permanent.

Sullivan said that nowhere is the slow speed more apparent than between Lynnwood and Bothell in the mornings, when the toll lanes sometimes match the speed of the general purpose lanes — despite the fact that a faster, clearer roadway is supposed to be the incentive for paying a toll.

“They never meet, and don’t even come close to meeting, the 45 miles an hour … because it just can’t handle the capacity,” Sullivan said.

According to Sullivan, the new budget essentially has given a green light to the tolling system from Lynnwood all the way to Tacoma. The network will be made up of the 405 tolls already in place; the coming Bellevue-to-Renton 405 tolls; the extension of the State Route 167 tolls from Auburn to the interchange with State Route 512 in Puyallup; and the Gateway Project to extend 167 to a rebuilt and extended State Route 509 in Tacoma.

While the new 167 toll lanes between Auburn and Puyallup will function like the 405 toll lanes, where a person can choose whether or not to drive in the tolled thoroughfares, the planned 167 and 509 extension will be more like the 520 bridge, Sullivan explained. There won’t be an option to take that strip of road without paying a toll.

More transportation makeovers

Other budget highlights include the addition of a second lane in each direction to State Route 18 between Issaquah-Hobart Road and I-90, and the allocation of $35 million for a new I-5 bridge over the Columbia River between Vancouver, Wash. and Portland.

“At least they’re amendable to adding capacity,” Sullivan said of the projects this biennium. “In most cases it will be tolled, but in the past we’ve always heard, ‘We can’t build our way out.'”

He is less excited about the ongoing work to implement congestion pricing in Seattle, so that drivers will need to pay to enter the downtown core.

Other cities around the world such as London, Stockholm, and Singapore, operate such systems, but these cities have complex transit systems that cover far more territory than Seattle’s single light rail line, Sullivan pointed out.

“People can’t afford to get into downtown to do their jobs, and now you’re going to have to pay,” Sullivan said. “Especially when there is no mature mass transit system.”

However, the idea of pay-by-mile charges for drivers will be talked about more in the near future, he said, because the state’s road usage pilot project wrapped up last year.