Search Results

Take a look at this LTE in the Seattle Times (link will probably only be good for a day), citing our 2008 Braking News report  in discussing Washington state’s budget woes: I have a simple proposal for closing the budget gap: Increase gas taxes by $1 per gallon. With current gasoline prices, this would likely bring us back to gas prices we were seeing a few years back and would...

Now, here’s a Dutch treat:  last week, the Netherlands became the first country to adopt a tax-by-the-kilometer system to pay for roads, bridges, and other car-oriented infrastructure.  As far as I can tell, it’s not a tax increase, but rather a tax shift:  the government will reduce taxes on car sales, slashing vehicle purchase prices by about a quarter, and replace the lost revenue by charging drivers a few cents...

Update: A version of this post appeared in Crosscut on May 6, 2009. In a surprise move yesterday afternoon, Washington’s governor Gregoire signed into law a package of spending commitments for the federal stimulus dollars for transportation. Among the roughly $340 million in spending is about $71 million for freeway widening projects—and these are mystifying, to say the least. The $71 million will be used to add general purpose lanes along I-405...

Yet again, Seattle’s schools are in a minor state of crisis.  The school board  is slated to vote today on a plan to close 5 schools in order to save $3.6 million next year. At the same time, Governor Gregoire, along with the mayor of Seattle and the King County executive, are planning to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a deep-bore tunnel, at a cost of $4.2 billion or...

Tom Downs of  Citiwire has a great article on the nationwide transit fiscal crunch.  High gas prices, coupled with a sluggish economy, have created a spike in bus ridership all across the U.S., as people have looked for a cheaper way to get to work.  But costs for transit agencies have also gone up; they’re facing the same fuel price increases that the rest of us are.  So just when...

Over the weekend, a good column by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times about Denmark’s success in insulating itself from high prices. I won’t try to reprise it here, but just want to highlight a critically important point: “I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not...

A few weeks ago we released a little video about rethinking the transportation landscape. It looks like we’re not the only ones trying to picture things a little differently. Just this week, leaders in Oregon, California, and Washington all took steps to tinker with local transportation habits. In Seattle, Mayor Greg Nickels took a cue from Portland and New York by instituting a few “car-free” Sundays where, throughout August, three...

We’vearguedbefore that one of the surprising reasons why Puget Sound’s roads-and-transit package failed was that voters were concerned about climate emissions. Today, there’s new polling data that buttresses our claim. The poll finds that 20 percent of “no”-voters cited global warming as a reason for opposing the measure. This is an astonishing figure—one I believe that’s totally unprecedented, anywhere. (Someone please correct me if I’m wrong!) Below, I’ve cherry-picked a...

While we’re on the subject of overlooked academic studies, here’s another goodie (pdf link): an analysis of whether cars pay their own way. The basic question: do taxes paid by drivers equal public spending to support driving? The short answer: Nope! In fact, we’d have to raise gas taxes by somewhere between 20 to 70 cents per gallon for driving to pay for itself. I’d recommend reading the study itself...

Seems like more and more people—even conservativeeconomists—are going on record in support of higher gas taxes. From an economists’ point of view, it’s a bit of a no brainer. Like just about any addiction, our gasoline habit carries lots of “externalities”—ie., costs that fall on everyone, rather than just the person who uses the gas. (Think climate change, oil spills, air pollution, security vulnerabilities, international military entanglements, economic risk from...