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I’ve been putting off commenting on Washington State’s recently-passed $8 billion transportationpackage—funded by a 9.5 cent per gallon increase and new weight-based vehicle fees—until I could figure out exactly how I feel about it. I still can’t. It’s complicated. In general, I like taxes on gasoline.  Gasoline carries many costs—security, air and water pollution, climate-warming emissions, and the like—that aren’t captured by the market price.  Which means that, no matter...

  (This post is part of a series.) For a couple years now I’ve been obsessed, on and off, with the fate of the Alaskan Way Viaduct:  its history (Seattle’s first major urban highway), its present (a seismically unstable eyesore that cuts off development options on Seattle’s downtown waterfront), and its future (still a conundrum—the city and the state want to replace it with a $4 billion tunnel, but nobody...

 (This post is part of a series.) The Seattle Times editorializes today in favor of a four cent per gallon hike in the Washington state gas tax. Now, I’m typically in favor of higher gas taxes, on the grounds that the fuel’s massive externalities—ranging from overseas defense costs, to government subsidies to oil companies, to infrastructure costs for roads and highways, to global warming and air pollution—aren’t reflected in the...

According to the Seattle P-I, Washington State legislators have introduced a bill that would raise taxes on vehicles to help pay for streets and highways. Now, part of me likes this idea. As it currently stands, cars and trucks don’t pay their own way.  The state gas tax doesn’t even cover the cost of building, maintaining, and operating the state’s road network. To break even, the state department of transportation...

 (This post is part of a series.) A while back, the Seattle city government decided that it wanted to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct—the seismically vulnerable aerial highway that cuts off the city’s downtown from its waterfront—with a tunnel. But what neither the city, nor anyone else, has decided is how to pay for the tunnel, which the state estimates could cost more than $4 billion. So far, the city...

Thomas Friedman hits one out of the park: “If we had imposed a new gasoline tax after 9/11, demand would have been dampened and gas today would probably still be $2 a gallon. But instead of the extra dollar going to Saudi Arabia – where it ends up with mullahs who build madrasas that preach intolerance – that dollar would have gone to our own Treasury to pay down our...

The Canadian federal government is going through its process of figuring out how to boost fuel economy, to comply with the nation’s Kyoto obligations. Unfortunately, gas tax increases are out. But gas-guzzler taxes, tax credits for hybrids, and-best of all-a comprehensive system of feebates are still on the table, as the Globe and Mail reports. It’s a very encouraging development. Feebates (fees imposed on the sale of inefficient vehicles that...

A close look at why society’s most-influential indicators–from the GDP to the Dow Jones–are failing us. This Place on Earth 2002 also presents a first effort at an alternative yardstick for the Northwest, by measuring how the region is doing in critical areas such as salmon health, sprawl, income inequality, and land use.