ODOT Proposes That Commuters Pay $600–2,200 per Year for Highway Expansion
This article was originally published on longtime Strong Towns contributor Joe Cortright’s blog, City Observatory. It is shared here with permission. All images for this piece were provided by the author unless otherwise indicated.
I-205 in Oregon. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/SounderBruce.)
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is proposing to pay for its widening of the I-205 Interstate South of Portland by charging tolls. These tolls will represent a significant increase in transportation costs for households living in the southern part of the Portland metropolitan area.
As City Observatory reported earlier, ODOT’s planned tolls will vary by time of day, and will charge users as much as $4.40 to drive I-205 between Oregon City and Wilsonville.
The project’s Environmental Assessment, just released, shows how these tolls will affect households in this part of the region. These data come from the project’s Economics Technical Report, part of the project’s Environmental Assessment.
The report uses travel modeling data and census data to estimate how much a typical household in the I-205 area will pay in tolls each year. The I-205 project would impose tolls of $2.20 (at peak hours) for cars driving across the I-205 Abernethy Bridge over the Willamette River and the I-205 bridge over the Tualatin River. Most of the people driving across these two bridges live in Clackamas County; the affected area (which the report calls the “Area of Potential Impact,” or API) includes parts of Southeast Portland, Washington County, and Northern Marion County. All, or nearly all, of the cities of West Linn, Gladstone, Lake Oswego, Oregon City, Canby and Wilsonville are included in the API.
About 125,000 households live inside the “API,” roughly one in seven of the households in the Portland Metropolitan Area.
According to the Economics Technical Report, the average household in this area will pay $600 per year in tolls. The net effect of tolling will be to increase the amount of money each household spends on transportation from 7.9 percent of their household income to 8.7 percent of their household income.
Of course, $600 is just an average. Some households living in this area may travel on these freeways only once or twice a week, and travel at off-peak hours when tolls will be lower. But regular commuters using the freeway at peak hours will pay much more. If you drive every day on I-205 through both toll points, you’ll pay $8.80 per day to use the roadway. Driving five days a week, 50 weeks a year, your total tolls would be $2,200 per year.
Joe Cortright is President and principal economist of Impresa, a consulting firm specializing in regional economic analysis, innovation and industry clusters. Over the past two decades he has specialized in urban economies, developing the City Vitals framework with CEOs for Cities, and developing the city dividends concept.
Joe’s work casts a light on the role of knowledge-based industries in shaping regional economies. Prior to starting Impresa, Joe served for 12 years as the Executive Officer of the Oregon Legislature’s Trade and Economic Development Committee. When he’s not crunching data on cities, you’ll usually find him playing petanque, the French cousin of bocce.
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