Thursday, September 01, 2005
Oregon DOT proposes toll roads
Except for a few bridges, Oregon hasn't had a toll road in more than a century. Now the Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing three public-private partnerships for new highway construction. One is for a bypass highway around the heavily congested communities of Newberg and Dundee in Oregon's wine-growing country. A second is for a new highway serving Damascus, currently a sleepy, pastoral area of very-low density development that Portland planners want to turn into a city of 75,000. The third proposal is for adding new lanes onto an existing freeway in the Portland area.
Oregon's constitution limits the use of gas taxes exclusively for highways, roads, and streets. But anti-auto transportation officials fritter much of the money away on useless studies and harmful traffic-calming (congestion-building) projects. Dissatisfied voters have rejected proposals to increase gas taxes, so tolls are needed to build new highways. Oregon drivers will probably accept tolls for new roads. However, if the state ends up diverting some of the tolls to inane rail transit or other wasteful projects, that acceptance will rapidly decline.
The state received two proposals on the Newberg-Dundee road, one from Bechtel and one from an Australian toll roads company known as the Macquarie Group (which also recently bought the Dulles toll road, as indicated elsewhere on this news page). Macquarie also submitted a proposal on the other two roads. The proposals will be accepted or rejected in October.
Oregon's constitution limits the use of gas taxes exclusively for highways, roads, and streets. But anti-auto transportation officials fritter much of the money away on useless studies and harmful traffic-calming (congestion-building) projects. Dissatisfied voters have rejected proposals to increase gas taxes, so tolls are needed to build new highways. Oregon drivers will probably accept tolls for new roads. However, if the state ends up diverting some of the tolls to inane rail transit or other wasteful projects, that acceptance will rapidly decline.
The state received two proposals on the Newberg-Dundee road, one from Bechtel and one from an Australian toll roads company known as the Macquarie Group (which also recently bought the Dulles toll road, as indicated elsewhere on this news page). Macquarie also submitted a proposal on the other two roads. The proposals will be accepted or rejected in October.
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