Fixing Low Rider, tale of the tolls

Now we're talking.

Thursday's proposal to add somewhat hefty tolls to the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge — also known as Low Rider — truly ignites the smoldering regional debate over congestion pricing.

The improvements announced for the bridge itself remain to be fully explored, but the first take on tolling gives us a chance to confront the beast, and think about it.

Tolls are so unpopular with some commuters that the bite back to their local legislators is going to draw blood. Tolls are seen as an add-on to the taxes already attached to cars, tires, license tags and gasoline. Tolls are seen as the double-whammy, and although they are part of Highway 520's history and the creation of roads in America, they don't sell well here.

And, anyone with one hand on the wheel understands that without tolling Interstate 90, the cost of congestion may be higher than imagined. If you can imagine I-90 looking all the time like it does westbound at 5 p.m. every day, you can foresee the overlap to I-90 from tolls on the northern bridge.

Low Rider, the Bridge of a Thousand Quarters, is so badly in need of repair that it took center stage over the other one so badly in need of repair, the Alaskan Way Viaduct. No tolls planned for that structure; the answer given is always there are options to the viaduct that would reduce toll revenues to below break-even.

I don't buy that argument. Tolling should exist where money is needed. If it helps pay for viaduct engineering and a creative design, tolls are an appropriate levy. Perhaps the notion that the new viaduct will be at street level dodges the issue of tolling, but it needn't. Tolls work just as well at ground level, as many Midwestern states have proved.

In essence, the coming squabble over the floating bridges will be about fairness. A road tax to get back and forth to Microsoft or Bellevue Square seems fair to me. Toll I-90, too. But the thoroughfares of Seattle are also useful tollgates to help the region pay for regional bottlenecks.

Let's start with a dime — for pedestrians, cyclists, commercial trucks and SOVs to cross the Montlake Cut. Let's toll the boat channel to the Ballard Locks during summer weekends. Let's toll the Aurora Bridge.

Serious local leaders anticipate the impact of tolling on communities where there won't be tolls. Across the top of Lake Washington, a more nimble and cheaper commute may emerge through Kenmore and Bothell to Juanita and North Kirkland or Woodinville.

A Bellevue politician also warned me that without tolling on I-90, the impact on the streets of Bellevue, Kirkland and the Sammamish Plateau is going to be even more congestion if there is a natural inclination to skip the $7 bill this morning.

Experts in the field say all over the country, motorists adapt by taking mass transportation, adjusting hours to pay lower tolls, carpooling and working from home. Tolling, they say, is the green option to change commuter habits.

If that is so, we have many more opportunities to toll — from West Seattle to I-5 — and to finally fix a dozen bridges in need of repair. Toll them.

Tolls are the inevitable cost of our commuter culture. They will rebuild Low Rider, help maintain the I-90 bridgeworks, and could carry us along the Seattle waterfront, but only if they are a regional solution and not target taxation.

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James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com