Road Pricing: Highway Tolling Suffers Huge Setback

“Gov. Tina Kotek on Monday announced her intention to halt plans to toll Portland-area freeways, citing uncertainty about the costs of planned freeway projects and the revenue tolling would bring in,” reported Jayati Ramakrishnan for The Oregonian on March 11.

In a letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission, which sets state transportation policy, Kotek said she believed it was time to end the work on the Regional Mobility Pricing Project, the state transportation department’s plan to impose per-mile tolls on interstates 5 and 205 from Wilsonville to Portland’s northern border.

The ambitious road tolling projects were included in landmark transportation funding legislation, HB 2017, signed into law by then-Gov. Kate Brown. See Planetizen: Interstate Highway Tolling Takes Major Step Forward in Pacific Northwest, December 9, 2018:

The state that implemented the first gas tax and the first bike tax took a huge step on [Dec. 6, 2018] toward becoming the first, since 1956, to toll all lanes on an interstate highway by approving an application to the Federal Highway Administration.

Ramakrishnan continues in The Oregonian:

The state’s path toward implementing tolling is uncertain at best,” Kotek wrote in her letter to commissioners. “After years of work, the challenges of implementing the Regional Mobility Pricing Plan (RMPP) have grown larger than the anticipated benefits.”

...

The plan has been met with fierce opposition from most sides, including residents in communities along I-205 that would likely see increased traffic from drivers trying to avoid tolls, and from environmental advocates who feel that proposed tolling costs are unnecessarily high and would fund freeway-widening projects.

However, the Oregon Department of Transportation's webpage on the Regional Mobility Pricing Project as of March 19 has yet to reflect the governor's announcement:

Project Status

The Regional Mobility Pricing Project would toll I-5 and I-205 in the Portland metropolitan region. Tolling is part of ODOT's long-term strategy to help pay for transportation improvements and provide faster, more efficient trips through the Portland metro region.

The Oregon Department of Transportation did not respond to this correspondent's inquiries as of publication time.

For additional past Planetizen coverage, see tags Oregon Transportation Commission and Regional Mobility Pricing Project.