Imagine this scene: A neighbor's house is on fire. The first fire truck arrives. But instead of using water on the blaze, the firefighters throw kerosene at it. The fire burns hotter, and the next fire truck shows up and this crew does the same thing. You shout, 'This is crazy! Why are you pouring fuel on the fire?” The fire chief says, “There's so much demand for water that there's none left for us - so we use whatever we can.”
Fire experts teach about the "Fire Triangle," the three ingredients necessary for a fire: oxygen, fuel and a heat source, such as a spark. Fighting fires means isolating one or more of these elements from the others. Understanding the fire triangle is a matter of life and death. Pick the wrong fire extinguisher, and we not only don't put out the fire, but we can make things worse.
There's another triangle in Clark County that causes the slower but equally catastrophic disaster of diminished quality of life, property losses, grievous injuries and even scores of deaths annually. This is the “Congestion Triangle.” Like fire and the fire triangle, congestion is what happens when the sides of the congestion triangle combine. But unlike the fire triangle, the congestion triangle is little understood - which is why our attempts to fight congestion are so much like using kerosene to fight a house fire.
What are the legs of the congestion triangle? The first is land-use planning dominated by the automobile, with its insatiable appetite for land.
The second leg is a perverse pricing and taxing system that hides most of the costs associated with each transportation mode and shifts many of those costs off transportation users and onto others.
The third leg is the idea that the solution to congestion is more capacity - that is, more money and more land, and more costs shifted onto property owners and businesses.
Alone, each of these legs doesn't cause fatal congestion. But in combination, they have brought Clark County (and most of Puget Sound) to a sad state: gridlocked, broke, choking on fumes and choking back fury at a system that spends so many hundreds of millions of dollars only to see the congestion worsen.
How can we respond to congestion without throwing fuel on the fire? Just as when fighting fires, we must address each leg separately and, above all else, reject any “solution” that aggravates any side of the congestion triangle.
Vancouver is a good example of how auto-dominated planning weakens the fabric and livability of a city. A huge portion of land downtown goes to nothing other than the care, feeding, and storage of automobiles. This makes the city dirtier, costlier, louder and less walkable, which makes it emptier. This both increases crime and encourages people to move away, which makes it harder for small shops and businesses to prosper, which encourages even more people to live and shop elsewhere -- except they demand that we cater to their cars when they do visit downtown.
Ways to fix the land-use leg are well-understood. There is a large and growing demand for pedestrian-oriented development and an extensive literature to explain it. In a nutshell, all we have to do is return to the ideal of cities that are fair communities designed so that everyone -- young and old, handicapped or not, rich or poor -- can participate in employment, civic activities and social society, whether or not they own or choose to drive an automobile.
The pricing and taxation leg is the hardest. The politically potent “Road Gang” demands more highway subsidies and spending while attacking transit subsidies. But even in the money we do spend on roads, it is critical that we raise money in ways that don't pour fuel on the fire. That means rejecting any form of tax -- such as license plate fees -- that isn’t tied to driving. It means that, instead of increasing the gas tax, we should end the state’s most lucrative and illogical tax break and apply the sales tax to gasoline.
As a user fee, the sales tax has the same pluses as the gas tax. But unlike the gas tax, the sales tax can be spent helping put out the fire with mass transit and projects for a walkable and transit-friendly community.
That's why the same dollars raised via sales tax can have a far better result than if raised via the gas tax. Clark County's Transportation Futures Committee recommended the sales tax on gasoline as the first place to look for more transportation money, because it doesn't fuel the congestion we're trying to address.
I don't have room to list even a tenth of the flaws in the third leg of the congestion triangle, the belief that the solution to traffic congestion is to build more road capacity. There isn't one example of any place where the strategy of trying to outrace congestion with capacity has worked. A Vancouver woman expressed how things work quite clearly: "Building a third highway bridge to deal with congestion is like getting a third dog to deal with fleas."
We're at the congestion crisis point. Our house is burning, and the legislative and county fire crews are getting ready to respond. Will they use a water hose, cooling the fire and saving our homes, raising transportation funds in ways that don’t make the problem worse? Or will they just make the congestion fire burn hotter by starving mass transit and pouring ever more dollars into road capacity?
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JulesJames
Sorry. Private transportation is personal freedom. Love riding a bike sometimes for fun. Will take a bus or train under certain circumstances. But the notion of living without the ability to visit Montana, the coast, or my friend across town at 3:00 AM if needed just doesn't fly with me, or with pretty much anyone else with a family to care for.
Thursday, June 1, 2023 Report this
MaKane
Most of the inhabited area of Washington's 39 counties are rural, placing higher and higher taxes on fuel punishes the economically challenged residents further, there are few work options in rural areas, and not working is not an option, how about only applying higher fuel taxes to large metro areas with established bus lines, which is where most of that money already goes.
Friday, June 2, 2023 Report this
jimlazar
I am an economist who came to Olympia to work as a research analyst at the legislature.
The notion of expanding the sales tax to include gasoline is one that I researched in a prior millenium Most of the legal opinion is that would not comply with the state constitution, which requires that excise taxes on motor vehicle fuel be devoted to highway transportation purposes.
I wrote a long thesis on ways around that restriction. The one that the lawyers thought would work was to apply the PROPERTY TAX to roads (an ad-valorem tax that would be paid by the cities, counties, and the state). Then extend the sales tax to gasoline, and use the proceeds to pay the property tax on roads. I thought I was clever. So did most of the lawyers.
But the state came up with a different solution which is, today, doing pretty much the same thing: tax the carbon emissions from the motor vehicle fuel, that pollutes our air. It's a pollution fee. The state now auctions off carbon pollution rights, and the costs for that have been built into the price of gasoline since the beginning of this year. Which is the biggest reason why Fred Meyer and Costco in Spokane charge about seventy cents a gallon more than Fred Meyer and Costco in Coeur d'Alene (about twenty cents of the difference is a lower road tax on the gasoline in Idaho)..
Check this gas price map: https://www.gasbuddy.com/gaspricemap?fuel=1&z=12&lat=47.71996215890253&lng=-117.04954261018908
That money can be spent for a wide range of climate-related purposes, including transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, rail transit, telecommuting, or other less carbon-intensive forms of transportation or substitutes for transportation. Here's where that money is being invested: https://ecology.wa.gov/Air-Climate/Climate-Commitment-Act/Auction-proceeds
So, in essence, the State of Washington is ALREADY applying a non-roadway tax to gasoline and diesel fuel. It took 43 years from my original research to find a pathway --- and the fact that our planet is on fire created the political will to address this challenge.
The first auction, at the beginning of the year, cleared at $4/ton of CO2 emissions. The second went higher -- $56/ton. Those are hefty prices -- California carbon allowances are only about $30/ton. Washington is being more assertive about carbon reductions.
Maybe we like our planet more than they like theirs. Hmm. Think about that...
Wednesday, June 14, 2023 Report this