It seems to me, the real environmental battle in Olympia this session is going to concern tolling.
[…]
The battle will be over this: What percentage of the money that’s generated from tolls should go to roads and what percentage should go to transit? The annoying negotiating starting point is a 90/10 split—90 for roads.
The transportation chairs in both the senate and the house […] are reportedly leaning toward keeping the dollars funneled toward roads for now.
Tolls collected by bridges should be spent replacing or maintaining bridges. I don’t know what kind of transit Josh is alluding to here. Light rail? Buses? Light rail is too expensive to be paid for with tolls on bridges. Maybe Josh is talking about “transit as mitigation” during construction. (Lots of new buses, getting stuck in traffic through Kenmore as they go around the lake. A sight to see!)
How about this: Spend bridge tolls on the bridge. Then, continue tolling, putting that money in a bank account. Then, in 50 years, when that 520 bridge is falling apart, we can just write a check to replace it. That way we can avoid the whole “90/10” argument, the whole “roads vs. transit” argument, and other dumb arguments that keep our region from getting shit done. I’m no Jim Vesely, but that seems like a good way to go.
Will
I have NEVER understood why our “budghet” does not include projected costs of maintenance and replacement. ame for the schools, if ya know we are going to spend the $$, we should be taxed beforehand to mitigate the costs rather than giving more money to rich folks tax free.
Tolling on 520 is a small piece of the puzzle. A region-wide congestion pricing plan would be worth (net and discounting future cash flows), about $24 billion in today’s dollars.
Here’s the more important question: voters (who have too much of a say in this stuff if you ask me–and that includes all of us) want all roads pricing profits to be funnelled back into roads projects, but they don’t want roads pricing to be established if there aren’t viable mass transit alternatives.
So where does the mass transit money come from?
Likewise, without real mass transit alternatives, roads pricing turns into a tax, rather than a way to help people make rational transportation choices in a free-market environment, rather than the one-choice/centrally-planned environment we have today.
You may want to check out Tim Eyman’s latest initiative, I-984. While there are some differences, Eyman basically proposes the same thing: spending all toll revenues on roads.
I agree with Mike about the need for area-wide congestion pricing and the need to fully fund transit alternatives to driving on those roads for people who want to avoid the tolls and do right by the environment at the same time.
Will’s view of corridor improvements is too narrow. If you want to have a fully functioning, high-capacity, less congested and efficient corridor, you’ve got to have transit on that corridor. On some corridors this means more bus service, in others it means bus rapid transit, in others light rail. An improved 520 corridor (just to pick one example) is not just about a new bridge. It’s about replacing an unsafe bridge, and high-capacity transit capacity, and bike capacity. It’s perfectly reasonable to have tolling contribute to all of those modes to create a fully functioning corridor.
Notice British Columbia just announced funding for a massive $11 billion 10 year transit expansion mostly for greater Vancouver.
This is on top of an existing $4 billion skytrain system which if in Greater Seattle would extend from downtown Tacoma to downtown Everett.
Occupation of Iraq, worst medical and education systems in the western world, most corrupt politicians in the western world, legislated torture, no habeas corpus
While Americans should hang our collective heads in shame, better we get our lazy asses to the next local Democratic party and give the corrupt party hierarchy the boot in time for the next election cycle.
Presumably in the case of the 520 bridge, the replacement supports transit because unlike the old one it’s supposed to have a transit/carpool lane in each direction. This will not only fix the problem associated with the twice-daily game of “chicken” where the HOV lane ends at the east end of the bridge, but should make the bus trip between Seattle and the Eastside much faster and more attractive.
That’s the theory.
Unfortunately, by the time the new bridge is built, the Eyman crowd will have lobbied the additional lanes into “bus/carpool/additional-toll-payers” lanes or plain ordinary traffic lanes, so the busses will have to meander along bumper-to-bumper with the rest of the fools.
Lotta topics there, seth…
Let’s see: For $7 billion (SO FAR!!!) ST can’t make it from the airport to beyond downtown. Another $4 billion for the commie-demos might pay for a siding near Tukwila.
Speaking of which, those folks in Tukwila must just love those 4 mile walks to the nearest light rail stop. Man, is that gonna save commuting hassles.
Actually, America has the best medical program in the world. That’s why folks come HERE to have that much needed operation. It’s a lie to say they go to France. And those corrupt politicians (DEMOCRATS!) are the ones who stormtroop in the middle of the night to arrest people for ONLINE GAMBLING IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME! (Whatever happened to that much-vaunted commie-demo canard about right-to-privacy???)
I know of no AMERICANS who have been tortured or AMERICANS who have been denied the right to trial. Only muslims who have infiltrated our country. They deserve every bit of agony they suffer for their evil.
“Notice British Columbia just announced funding for a massive $11 billion 10 year transit expansion mostly for greater Vancouver. . . . This is on top of an existing $4 billion skytrain system which if in Greater Seattle would extend from downtown Tacoma to downtown Everett.”
NO new taxes for it either.
Fuck Sound Transit and its sales tax proposals. Let ST tax business income, miles driven in vehicles, and employee counts. Then we’ll get the voter approval we need for more light rail.
So, what’s really the difference between Vancouver and here?
Whatever it is, our “Amurrikan way” of doing things doesn’t seem to be working very well.
@8 you need to dig into the BC transit announcement more deeply. It’s not paid for, nor do they know how to pay for it after the initial few years of construction. They’re just delaying the finance issue until 2012 or 2015, when opposing a tax increase would just mean flushing existing work down the toilet and/or defaulting on a bunch of bonds.
I don’t like the way we do transportation planning down here, but at least we’re a little more honest about the money up front.
10 Maybe being “more honest” ain’t all that great if the net result is eigher nothing done or worse yet, something half-assed.
Tolls stink – you have to stop to pay for them – or they have that new system where you get charged by mistake for not having the toll system pass – even though you do.
Go to the damn East coast if you want tolls. Only the rich will be able to afford driving with gas prices and tolls.
What happens when you toll 520? People will go over I-90 and clog that. Then do you toll I-90 too? what if I am not carrying cash with me? what if I don’t buy the pass becasue I rarely use the bridges?
No – this is not well thought out….roads and rail made a hell of a lot more sense.
@ 1 “…. rather than giving more money to rich folks tax free.”
Giving? Giving?
It’s their money, the state isn’t “giving” them anything.
My Marxist Detection Meter is lighting up.
@1 I don’t understand why Seattle School District is spending $500 million building new schools at the same time it is closing schools over parents’ objections (presumably for lack of students and/or money), but I do know that’s a better use of $500 million than giving it to Clay Bennett to build a shiny new basketball palace for his personal benefit and profit.
@14 RR
I agree. Seems dumb to me too.
@3 Eyman also proposes spending $120 million of General Fund revenues from vehicle sales taxes on “congestion relief” without explaining what taxes he would raise or spending he’d cut to make up the resulting shortfall. Does he want to release felons from prison? Throw old people out of nursing homes onto the street? Deny medical care to poor kids? Spend the state’s “rainy day” reserves just as we’re entering a recession?
This irresponsible initiative is typical Eyman pie-in-the-sky: He promises voters an expensive new program without raising taxes, playing on the “something-for-nothing” mentality of ignorant and gullible people.
Even if the money were available, which it’s not (without cutting other programs), it’s questionable how much “congestion relief” drivers would get from Eyman’s scheme. Synchronizing traffic lights, etc., is at best a bandaid on the problem. Our congestion is caused by too little road capacity for a growing population and increasing number of cars. You can’t fix that by robbing other needs to pay for what is little more than window dressing on the problem.
@13 what is “socialist” about a philosophy that all people pay equally for the costs of services rather than borrowing some form the rich and then paying them back .. from taxes???
It seems to me that any cost that we know we will have to apy should be paid out of cash flow .. that is taxes .. rather than borrowing.
Build a bridge? Fine, then the sate budget should incur a mandatory cost for maintenance!
The only time bonds make sense to me is when you are doing something NEW .. like building lt rail.
I think I am the conservative on this issue.
@4 Fine as far as it goes; but have you asked yourself (or thought about) why drivers should not only pay for their own transportation but everyone else’s too? Why shouldn’t light rail be paid for by the people who ride on it?
Trust me on this! The HA Happy Hooligans will sooner form a volunteer brigade to fight in Iraq before there’s any light rail capacity, immediate or planned for, on a new 520.
Tolls will happen. They should be for the purpose of building and maintaining a new bridge. Period! If rail zealots want a piece of the action, then let them price their product sufficiently to build and maintain what they have (which is interersting since, to date, they have nothing) and provide for new stuff.
Rail people always seem eager to dip into the pockets of non-rail people but squeal like stuck pigs when a tit for tat argument pops up.
Included in a new bridge ought to be additional general purpose lanes and bus capacity. If there’s to be any HOV lanes, then let them be governed by what Tim Eyman is proposing in his new inititative and have them open during off-peak hours.
This really needn’t be so complicated.
The Piper
To Rabbit at 16:
Exactly! In fact, that same problem plagues almost all initiatives (Eyman’s, the “small class size” one, etc.) – there is only the “good” side in the initiative: LOWER TAXES! SMALLER CLASSES! Never the other side: how do we pay for it? What gets cut?
I say junk the whole initiative system. If I want to live in a direct democracy, I’ll move to a small town in New Hampshire. I like representative government much better.
The “idea” of having only the people who use it (bridge/road) pay of it sounds good in the abstract. But in reality, infrastructure can’t be built and maintained that way. For infrastructure (roads/sewers/electric) to work, everything has to be connected. You can’t JUST build/repair a road or two in the ‘rich’ sections of town (where they can afford it) and leave gaps in the areas that can’t. Tolls will help pay ‘some’ of it, but never all of it.
Remember, NO transportation system is paid for entirely by the users. You think your $250 Horizon plane ticket paid for the airport, runways, FAA, etc? Not even close. Airports, trains and roads are ‘group’ infrastructure projects. They’re too expensive to be paid for by “only” the people who use them, and yet too important to the economy as a whole to not have them.
Roger ..
It seems to me that it is very difficult to determine who pays the real costs of things like transportation.
Suppose I have amanufacturing company called elcheapo, Inc.
ecinc’s gimminck is that we use only illegal immigrants and we use light rail to transport them from their barracks at Ft. Lewis. Should the immigrants pay the fairs? Should ecinc?
Or suppose I could prove that we could save 5 billion for a new 520 by putting a cable car across the lake for 599,999?
Who pays for the extra capacity on 520?
I like to start with the simplest issue possible. In this case, can anyone tell me why do we issue bonds for expected expenses? It seems to me .. whether we use tolls or taxes,,that we have known that 520 would need work for #) years! Shouldn’t the needed capital have been budgeted for over that time?
My thought is that all off the books expenses should include a tax impact statement … bonded expenses esp. If is going to cause an increase in my effin taxes, then either the legislature should raise taxes or lower some othert expense rather than going to rich folks for a loan I have to pay back.
Make sense?
How come no one has breached the issue that tolling will inherently cut down on congestion by having LESS CARS ON THE ROAD. If it cost you seven dollars round trip to come from the Eastside, perhaps you will decide to shop at the Bellevue Nordstrom instead of come downtown to do it. After a few years people will make SMART living choices and begin living on the same side of the damn lake as they work. I presume by the time that we have made enough money from tolls to pay for a new bridge, we wont even NEED a big new bridge and we can spend all that money on mass transit, yay!
Also, people who bitch about the more transit from Seattle to the Eastside obviously dont take the bus. They run EVERY HALF HOUR to ANY EASTSIDE SUBURB from 5AM to 11PM. Thats as good as almost any neighborhood in Seattle to downtown, so stop bitching.
@23 ..
Cuz most folks want IT for free. Whatever IT is ..food, sex, love, transit, etc.
The problem is that so far noone has discovered an economic system that distributes IT free of cost. The closest may be Hinayanna Buddhism that requires monks to beg. Sound good?
Shouldn’t we have BEEN saving for the bridge? Well yes, but the voters are lazy and cheap. They WANT something for nothing (what human doesn’t). If ANY public project actually included the lifetime cost of maintenance, upgrades and eventually replacement we’re be HORRIFIED! Think of what the magic solution to all our problems (roads) would even be…is that a $200 million dollar highway? Yes, in construction costs. But add pothole repair, repainting, new lanes/bridges and eventually complete replacement costs…now it’s $500 million. Sound economic policy to figure that cost to begin with? Yes! Good f**king luck getting cheap voters to understand that.
When I bought my last condo, our homeowners dues INCLUDED raising money to pay for a new roof in 10 years. I thought that was great, but MOST of the owners thought it cost too much per month and wanted “their” money back…NOW. Dumb, greedy, but human.
True…a toll would cut down on some traffic and make the east siders think twice before coming to Seattle for baseball, basketball, football, hockey, ballet, symphony, opera, theater, zoo, aquarium, ferries, nightclubs, Pike Place Market, etc. And it would keep the Seattle folks from going to Bellevue for….er….um…Pottery Barn?
@18 RR:
Drivers should subsidize transit, because they will benefit from reduced congestion. But I agree that businesses should also subsidize transit so they can get their goods moved more efficiently and because their employees will have more commute options.
@17 “…….@13 what is “socialist” about a philosophy that all people pay equally for the costs of services rather than borrowing some form the rich and then paying them back .. from taxes???””
There is nothing socialist about the notion of paying equally.
But that’s not what you said.
“Give more money to rich folks tax free” implies that the state is, in fact, giving money to the “rich folks.”
The money they earn is already theirs…you TAKE AWAY from it when you impose taxes.
OK, those of you bitching about how they don’t wanna pay for transit because they don’t use it…look at it this way:
Suppose I use the bus or ride a bike or live close enough to where I work that I can walk to and from. Then why should I have to pay for it when one of you dumbasses has to be pried out of what’s left of your SUV when you learned the hard way that you aren’t a bigger stud behind the wheel than everyone else, and they have to drag you off to Harborview for emergency surgery, 10 weeks in the burn unit, and 8 months of rehab?
The cost of constructing, maintaining, policing and administrating the infrastructure for everyone to drive their gas buggies to and fro is perhaps the biggest drain on our economy save for that poor excuse for a war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It affects each and every one of us, and the benefits are becoming less and less worth the trouble.
@16 my point with bringing up Eyman’s initiative is that, while the auto sales tax portion of the initiative seems to be the main thrust, the most important part is in tolling–something that we’ll see a lot more of in the future since we can’t find tax revenues to pay for transportation projects.
Consider region-wide roads pricing on every highway in the region (something Sims has talked about, something the federal gov’t is hot about nationwide, and what the tolling legislation in Olympia is meant to regulate). Annual gross revenue for such a project would exceed $1.6 billion. The $130 million from the auto sales tax is peanuts.
Eyman wants every penny of any future road user fee to go to roads projects exclusively. The pro-asphalt crowd knows that roads pricing is the future. They can’t avoid it, so they want it all to go to ashpalt. Including something like this in a ballot initiative now is really clever, because your average voter won’t even notice it.
What this all basically is saying is that the development of our society over the last half-century has been dependent on the “free ride” we got from Uncle Fed being able to justify the one-time construction of the interstate highways as a “defense transportation system”….and it ain’t gonna happen again. We’ve gleefully bought and driven our big fancy machines and chosen where to live, work, play and shop based on the assumption that having roads appear out of nowhere as if provided by the Almighty was always going to be the case.
Well, guess what, folks…the party’s just about over.
@29 “……..Suppose I use the bus or ride a bike or live close enough to where I work that I can walk to and from. Then why should I have to pay for it when one of you dumbasses has to be pried out of what’s left of your SUV….?”
You DON’T as long as we don’t pay for your bike lanes either.
There’s so much bullshit in #7 it’s hard to know where to begin.
Let’s start with our dysfunctional health care system. Here are some of its salient features:
1) Extremely high A & O costs – 25% of our health care dollars go to insurance companies who deliver no health care
2) Insurance companies cover only healthy people from whom they can reap enormous profits
3) 17% of U.S. population has no health coverage, and the 83% who do can’t rely on their policies because insurance companies often refuse to pay
4) No competition – patients have no way of knowing what services cost or even what they’re being charged for
5) Massive fraud – patients are routinely overbilled and/or overcharged by hospitals, and doctors and hospitals steal billions from Medicare by padding bills
6) Cost transfers – the cost of indigent care and bad debt from patients who fail to pay are routinely passed through to paying customers by raising their bills to cover these losses
7) Poor quality care – hospital mistakes kill almost as many Americans as car accidents; GOP response is to take away the right to sue, making patients bear the financial costs of errors by sloppy doctors
8) Lax oversight – regulation of hospitals is ineffective; a hospital is one of the more dangerous places to be because of the high risk of secondary infections; regulation of doctors by states is a joke, bad doctors are rarely disciplined, and when they are a bad doctor can simply set up shop in another state
9) Unaffordable – America spends more on health care as a % of GDP than any other country yet the quality of our care is below that of many third world countries that offer universal care to their citizens
Now let’s talk about TORTURE. The idiot @7 apparently sees no immorality in torturing innocent foreigners. The fact is the vast majority of people who have been detained and tortured by the U.S. were completely innocent and many have been released to their own countries without charges being brought. The International Red Cross estimated that over 90% of the Abu Ghraib torture victims were innocent noncombatants who were arrested arbitrarily or by mistake. The statement that “only muslims who infiltrated our country” have been tortured is utterly false; virtually all of the victims of U.S. torture are foreign nationals seized abroad, mostly in their own countries.
@7, you are one morally deprived, sick, pathetic, lying piece of shit.
@8 I have no doubt light rail will remain highly popular among those who promote it so long as they can figure out a way to make someone else pay for it.
10, 11 – There was nothing honest about telling voters light rail would cost them only $120 a year.
I’m still waiting for someone to explain how you pay for a $28 billion light rail system by collecting $120 a year from 1 million households for 20 years.
$120 x 1 million x 20 years = $2.4 billion
If more people knew the truth — that light rail costs 10 times what supporters said — the “no” vote on Prop. 1 would have been much larger than it was.
@12 I agree tolls stink. A local option gas tax is a better way to pay for 520.
@13 Marxism is when the working class pays all the taxes and the rich get all the government contracts and subsidies.
@17 SJ, bonds are a sensible way to pay for capital investments in infrastructure that will be used for many years, and state bonding authority is NOT used to finance road and bridge maintenance; those costs come out of transportation operating budgets financed by transportation taxes.
@19 Geez piper, I can’t believe I actually agree with you. You must have been reading my comments.
@20 You’re not from around here, are you? You don’t understand our western ways. You’re pissing into the wind if you think we westerners will ever give up the initiative or our other trappings of populism. I say junk Eyman instead! There’s nothing wrong with the initiative process that can’t be fixed by sending Eyman to a landfill.
@21 As a matter of fact, much of the ancillary aviation costs you mention ARE paid for by landing fees (passed on to ticket buyers as a cost of doing business), ticket taxes, aviation fuel taxes, and other dedicated aviation taxes.
@37 If people only knew Republicans made up facts 10 times faster than anyone else, they’d vote against them in higher numbers (is the earth only 6,000 years old?) LOL
@21 (continued) Tolls will pay only about 1/4th the cost of the 520 bridge. The rest of the money is coming from fuel taxes and a variety of other sources. The tolls are needed to close the funding gap between the money already available and the cost of the replacement bridge.
Your comment about “rich” and “poor” areas paying for roads is a red herring. This would be a valid argument if applied to the idea of building PRIVATE roads for those who can afford to pay for them. But we all pay the same fuel and vehicle taxes for the roadways we use in common. Fuel taxes are fairer than other taxes because you pay in proportion to how much you use the roads — the more you drive, the more you pay.
It’s misleading to compare transportation to, say, public schools. Public education does benefit the whole society. In addition, an educated populace is essential to the political functioning of a democracy. Transportation, on the other hand, is a personal expense that varies depending on how much you choose to use it. You can make a logical argument that large businesses who depend on public infrastructure for their business transportation needs, e.g. Boeing, are not paying their fair share. Businesses typically hold the jobs they provide hostage to force taxpayers to pay for infrastructure that directly benefits their businesses, just as they demand that taxpayers foot the cost of training their workers, and — in Wal-Mart’s case, even demand that taxpayers pay for their employees’ health care. I even remember reading a news story of an appliance manufacturer who moved his plant to Mexico after the State of Michigan refused his demand that the state pay his workers’ wages! So, yes, businesses are freeloading and should be made to pay their fair share of these costs. But retirees subsidize the transportation costs of commuters through sales taxes, property taxes, or other general taxes isn’t fair to the retirees.
If I suggested that drivers, property owners, or consumers pay gas taxes, property taxes, or sales taxes to pay for millions of dollars of wildlife corridors (also known as “rabbit freeways”), would you think that was fair? Shouldn’t rabbits build their own rabbit trails?
@22 “It seems to me that it is very difficult to determine who pays the real costs of things like transportation.”
Not really. Almost all public transportation dollars come from fuel taxes, vehicle taxes and fees, and license fees … except for the sales tax that supports transit.
@43 Really. Gosh, I didn’t know my little $250 plane ticket paid for Delta/United business costs (buying billions in planes, hundreds of millions in fuel, personnel, pilots, insurance) but ALSO paid to build all the airports in the nation, maintain them, run the FAA, etc. That’s really stretching my dollar! And the truth!
Yes they pass on ‘some’ of the landing fees and such, but not a big percentage. Think of this way, look in the Federal budget and see how many billions are spent on the FAA, grants/loans to aviation as transportation. If “user” ticket prices covered the costs, then their budget (out of Federal taxes) would be $0.00. Is it?
@33 care to provide sources?
Or did you just watch Sicko?
@22 (continued) Historically, transportation infrastructure has been funded with dedicated transportation taxes. What we’re seeing in this thread is some arguments that we should abandon that model and fund transportation from general tax revenues. That would shift some transportation costs from users to non-users. One of the unintended consequences of this would be to encourage more driving. Any time you shift the cost of something from users to non-users, you are creating a “free good” and as you know that increases demand for the subsidized product or service. It also encourages waste; if you shift the cost of roads, say, from gas taxes to sales taxes the effect would be to lower the cost of driving and you would have more people doing more frivolous or unnecessary driving, adding to traffic congestion and air pollution problems not to mention wasting increasingly scarce oil. I see no reason why transportation funding should be changed from the user-charges model to a general-tax-burden model.
Will wrote:”How about this: Spend bridge tolls on the bridge. Then, continue tolling, putting that money in a bank account. Then, in 50 years, when that 520 bridge is falling apart, we can just write a check to replace it.”
Will, do you really think your political side will allow a bank account to grow with $$$ they can’ touch? This is Blue FUWA BTW.
Hint: Think SS Trust Fund and how the Democrats in Congress raided it for over 40 years.
“43 Really. Gosh, I didn’t know my little $250 plane ticket paid for Delta/United business costs (buying billions in planes, hundreds of millions in fuel, personnel, pilots, insurance) but ALSO paid to build all the airports in the nation, maintain them, run the FAA, etc. That’s really stretching my dollar! And the truth!”
Man are you way out there…….
Are you really that stupid or just putting us on.
@22 “why do we issue bonds for expected expenses?”
For the same reason we borrow money to buy houses. Very few people can pay cash for a house. If you didn’t buy a house until you had saved enough money to pay cash for it, you wouldn’t have a house until you were 50 or 60 years old. That doesn’t work for someone in his 20s or 30s who needs a place to raise a family.
Businesses work the same way. Many businesses borrow money to build plants and buy equipment because they don’t have the cash to pay for these things up front.
A well-run credit system creates benefits for everyone involved. Communities get the infrastructure they need; businesses get the plant and equipment they need; and people with capital are provided a way to invest their funds and earn a return on money they don’t need to spend today.
When you’re building a bridge with a useful life of 50 years, it makes sense to pay for it over the life of the bridge, instead of all upfront. If you imposed very high taxes today to quickly raise the money needed for the bridge, today’s taxpayers would be subsidizing the people who will use the bridge long after today’s taxpayers are dead or have moved away. That isn’t fair. Paying for the bridge over time spreads the cost among all who use it.
@ “an educated populace is essential to the political functioning of a democracy. Transportation, on the other hand, is a personal expense that varies depending on how much you choose to use it.”
No, transportation is NOT just some personal ‘choice’ to go to a Sonics game or not. Everything we do in our society depends on it, whether you drive or not. Personal trips for ‘fun’ are only one use. It’s how we EAT. Over 300 million Americans rely on the roads to get their food (don’t grow it at home, but buy it at a supermarket). It’s how all raw goods and finished products get to where they’re going. Even if you NEVER drive, but sit and home and use a bike occasionally…that package you ordered from Amazon came on a TRUCK that used the highways.
Tolls, gas taxes, or general taxes are fine. It doesn’t really matter, in the end, regardless, you will pay for it even if you don’t drive. Fine, don’t cross 520 and pay tolls. But the food/goods you buy WILL cross it, and pay the toll and pass it on to you.
Despite what Tim Eyeman promises, there is no free lunch.
@23 Why should drivers pay tolls so you can ride on mass transit free?
@25 “Well yes, but the voters are lazy and cheap.”
Bullshit! Most voters work very hard but struggle to make ends meet. A typical household has a limited amount of income and is faced with endless demands for money, and can’t possibly say “yes” to everything because the money just doesn’t stretch that far. There are a few exceptions, though. Roger Rabbit is lazy and cheap.
@27 There are a number of policy arguments in favor of making drivers subsidize transit — within reason. And by that I mean a reasonable proportion of costs that are reasonable to begin with for a system of reasonable design that has a reasonable impact on traffic congestion, air pollution, and the other side effects of driving.
What is not reasonable is making drivers pay most or all of the costs of a super-expensive light rail system that will be used by only a tiny percentage of commuters.
What is not reasonable is building an expensive monorail or light rail system with no parking at the stations where commuters access the system.
What is not reasonable is making retirees with low incomes pay higher taxes to subsidize commuters who have much more income than the retirees do.
@56 What the hell is your point? LOL. Yes, everyone works and it’s tough to pay all the bills. That’s nice. The point was that we are NEVER given the ‘real’ budget of a project…say a school. What we get is (most) of the construction costs. Then we’re surprised every time, on every issue…year after year after year…when SHOCKING…there’s MORE money needed. Now you have to paint the school every couple years. You need to replace plumbing. You have to start saving for a NEW school in 25 years or whatnot. We build shit pretending it will magically last forever and need no maintenance, and THEN act SHOCKED that those evil political types are coming back for more money. Who could have possible guessed that the 20 year old school would need $5 million in electrical work. ANYONE WITH A BRAIN!
13, 28 — You took his comment out of context. What he’s talking about is tilting a tax system that’s already heavily tilted in favor of the rich even more in that direction.
For example, the Gates Commission study found that Washington’s lowest income households pay 17% of their income in state and local taxes, while the state’s most affluent households pay only 4% of their income in state and local taxes. That’s unreasonable and unfair.
Not to be overlooked is the fact that the federal tax system that penalizes wage earners and rewards investors creates disincentives to working and being productive. I don’t work or produce anything! Why should I? If I work, I’ll pay 25% income tax + 7.65% FICA tax on my wages, total 32.65%. But if I sit all day on my fat rabbit ass in front of a computer screen flipping stocks, I pay only a 5% (or, at most, 10%) capital gains tax. So why the fuck should I work? I’d be crazy to work. Congress doesn’t want me to work! Congress has imposed punitive taxes on earned income, while rewarding unearned income. So, I prefer to get income by means other than inheriting it! This shouldn’t be mystifying. If Congress flips the tax code and taxes capital gains at 32.65% and taxes wages at 5% then I’ll get a job and work! It’s all a matter of where the incentives and disincentives are. If you tax the shit out of poor people and coddle the rich, then I prefer to be idle rich than working poor. See how that works?
by means other than earning it
Jack@58: When has Pelletizer had a point? He likes to see his words in pixels even when everyone else asks “What the hell is your point”? Making a point is not his necessity.
“The transportation chairs in both the senate and the house […] are reportedly leaning toward keeping the dollars funneled toward roads for now.”
Jesus Christ – Josh Feit mentions that in passing? And The Stranger is supposed to be enlightened on this issue? (the same people who told us light rail to Tacoma was a waste of money)
“What is not reasonable is making drivers pay most or all of the costs of a super-expensive light rail system that will be used by only a tiny percentage of commuters.”
Nice to see Roger Rabbit is (once again) citing the right wing liars he pretends to distrust on most threads.
Then the subject of effective transit systems comes up, and old mr. cranky pants (“you’ll have to remove the steering wheel from my cold, dead hands”) sounds exactly like the right wing trolls.
What Roger and Trolls have in common: a paranoid distrust, disdain, and disgust for their neighbors and communities. And a strange self-centric view of the world.
In other words…
http://thetransitoption.wordpr.....f-my-lawn/
The new 520 bridge will have 66% SUV and 33% HOV, so why do we need to split the tolls? It will probably be closer to 60%/40% if you include a bike lane.
Does transit or bikes pay tolls? Not from what I see on the Tacoma Narrows bridge.
Josh ignores the fact that buses need roads to drive on.