Government should be responding to demand not trying to regulate it with higher prices. We need to see results (or lack thereof) from light rail before it is expanded. Otherwise, it’s just another pet project that isn’t justified by demand.

So, instead of asking for your thoughts, I’ll just lay out mine. I see enormous problems with expanding roads and lane miles in our region. You write:

“Next, congestion pricing is a punitive fee placed on taxpayers for a failure in government. Neither the drivers nor the taxpayers are at fault for congestion. The responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of government for failing to meet the demand.”

Our region offers geographic and topographic bottlenecks that make expanding lane miles either impractical or wildly expensive. In addition, urban and suburban development has built up to the edges of the freeway (in the case of the Seattle Convention Center and the Mercer Island cap, over the freeway). Expanding lane miles on the Narrows required not only the cost of building the bridge but the cost of buying significant amounts of property.

With all that in mind, I would guess that expanding the local freeway system “to meet demand” would be untenable because of an incredibly high price tag and that it would likely require unpopular decisions like using eminent domain.

I would argue against your point that the Democratic controlled house is to blame for the funding problem. The high price tag of redoing overpasses, buying land, and building vertically would deter a lot of Republicans. In fact, the 2005 gas tax is a good example of road infrastructure was opposed by a lot of Republicans. I know that many did favor it, but I think it’s a good example where there is opposition to road expansion from non-Democratic corners.

I’m not saying that congestion pricing is the best option to fix the congestion problem. In fact, I think it’s probably not a great idea for regions without a strong mass transit system that gives a viable alternative to poorer commuters. But to say that the government has failed to provide for adequate lane miles is incorrect. A better way to say is that the population of the region–through their elected representatives and the initiative process–doesn’t want more lanes.

If you want to weigh lane expansion vs. eminent domain, then just say so. But you’re trying to plug that question into a post on congestion pricing. Context is everything.

As for how you frame my disagreements with you and others on this site, each of those has a different context that has to be considered. That context extends to other sites because some people, I won’t mention any names, have a habit of continuing discussions from this site on other sites where I may not notice them until weeks later.

Also, you didn’t mention when I agree with people. More often than not, if I agree with someone, I say nothing. Which shouldn’t be confused with my saying nothing when someone is being a jackass or is refuting their own comment.

This isn’t a fluff site where we all just want to get along. It’s an issues site.

I hate to keep getting all meta on you, but have you noticed that anyone who disagrees with you in an argument is either tossing out a red herring, a mouthpiece for their party, outright lying, imposing their values on others, or is just not informed? Can you not allow that someone who disagrees with you might be sincere, arguing in earnest, intellectually honest, respectful of other opinions, and well-informed? Perhaps even coming from a similar value system as your own, despite arriving at a different stance? Or that someone who asks you a question, like how you would weigh lane expansion vs eminent domain, or whether you think investing in rail might deliver an ROI greater than the investment (a la freeways) may actually just want to hear your answer?

Another option is expanding other roads that will take some of the burden off of that area of I-5.

South Tacoma has bad congestion. My understanding of your argument is that bad congestion in South Tacoma is a result of the government failing to expand the lanes there. So I’m asking (for the third time) do you believe that lane expansion of freeways is important enough that the state should use eminent domain in order to expand the lanes if the property owners are unwilling to sell their land to the DOT?

It’s not a red herring, it’s a legitimate question about the practicality of expanding freeway lanes. I take the point about the convention center, although that brings up another question: if lane expansion is de facto not an option somewhere regardless of the cause (geographical, a convention center, etc) then what? Metering and re-timing lights isn’t going to do much good if you have many lanes forced to converge into a few.

Of all the things that I brought up in this post, you want to use a red herring argument to try to prove that congestion pricing is a good thing?

It never comes down to a simple either/or, black-and-white choice between the two. Removing HOV lane restrictions is often an option. Metering where necessary. Rebuilding intersections, off-ramps and on-ramps can help. Sometimes just retiming traffic lights on streets used for ingress and egress can reduce congestion.

So again, would you be willing to use eminent domain to get the needed land in Tacoma? (and why do I always have to repeat my questions to you?)

So a second option would be to tear down the convention center.

You’re talking about an artificially (and possibly deliberately) created problem. Liberals seem to be playing a game of chess where they move pieces around to block the moves that their opponent (in this case the taxpayers and drivers) might want to make. In this case it’s a building. In another it’s a salmon run. Soon we’ll see the ‘carbon footprint’ argument. In the end, it’s the taxpayer, the employee and the business who lose the game.

Or we could just wait for liberals in Seattle to drive business out of town or cause enough of them to fail with the high cost of doing business there. Then there won’t be so much traffic. It worked in downtown Tacoma. (In case you didn’t catch it, I’m being facetious here.)

I ask because I’m fairly convinced that to get enough lanes to entirely reduce congestion on the freeway you would have to significantly expand the right-of-way.