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Guest blogger Mark Trahant, a member of Sightline’s board of directors, is a writer, speaker and Twitter poet. He is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and lives in Fort Hall, Idaho. Trahant’s most recent book is “The Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars.” I drove across the Northwest this past weekend. A 1,700-mile trip from Idaho to Seattle, returning via rural roads in Washington, and freeways in Idaho...

I’m going to sound like Clark for moment. According to the most recent forecasts from Washington’s Office of Financial Management, drivers in the state will guzzle 2.6 billion gallons of gasoline in 2027. I have no idea if that’s accurate, but I do know that it’s 21 percent—and 700 million gallons—lower than the forecast that OFM made just 9 months previously. My chart has the details:

According to the most recent forecasts from the Washington State Office of Financial Management, drivers in Washington state will rack up about 65 billion miles on the highways in 2031. Now, I have no idea if that number is anywhere close to accurate. Nobody does. But what I DO know is that that number is over 21 billion miles lower than the forecast that OFM made 3 years ago, and...

Seattle councilmember Mike O’Brien has a solution to state budget cutting that is both brilliant and profoundly moral. He’s produced a nice 4 minute video, which you can watch here:  The premise of O’Brien’s argument is that there’s something fundamentally wrong with state budgets that impoverish early childhood education, but still fund multi-billion dollar roads projects. (Of course, in addition to early childhood education there are many other vital government services that are starved for funds in...

Michael Ennis may have batty ideas about parking policy, but he’s got a nice post today on a subject I’ve been meaning to write about: Washington state transportation revenue is in dire straits. New models show that revenue forecasts have consistently missed the mark. To illustrate the problem, check out this analysis of gasoline consumption, which is (obviously) a key driver of gas tax receipts: What it shows—if you look at the difference...

I just read an outstanding, succinct, and damning history of freeways and cities called Paved with Good Intentions: Fiscal Politics, Freeways, and the 20th Century American City. If you are appalled by Kemper Freeman’s efforts to scuttle light rail on Interstate 90 and the tunnel in Seattle, the Columbia River Crossing in Portland, or any huge, spendy highway project that seems to completely undermine the principles of good urban planning,...

Of late, the oil industry has been swarming Olympia with guys in hard hats. It’s political theater meant to halt a small tax increase on toxic chemicals, which would pay for pollution clean-up. But the industry has been talking out of both sides of its mouth. Industry is arguing two mutually incompatible things: that the tax increase would hurt consumers and that it would hurt refineries. But you can’t have it both ways. The...

In a cringe-inducing response to my corrections to his memo on the state’s hazardous substance tax, Washington Policy Center’s Brendon Houskeeper defends his mistaken math. It’s a little embarrassing. For Washington Policy Center, that is. Look, we’re a think tank. You’re a think tank. Occasionally, fact checking falls down. It’s OK to make a mistake once in a while; just admit it and move on. Whatever you do, though, don’t...

Or maybe not: “These are multibillion-dollar projects, and there just isn’t the funding within the current gas tax to pay for these things,” said Rep. Jim Moeller, a Vancouver Democrat who serves on the House Transportation Committee. That’s a recent article in the Vancouver Columbian pointing out, correctly, that state gas tax revenues will not be sufficient to pay for all the big new roadway projects on the table in Washington....

Flat out wrong. That’s the only way to describe the oil industry’s claims about a proposed increase to Washington’s hazardous substance tax. Consider this ill-informed article at Washington State Wire: [subhead] As Much as Six Cents a Gallon The money has to come from somewhere, though—your local gas station, for instance. Opponents say the plan could raise gas prices as much as six cents a gallon, if oil companies can...