By David Sarasohn
As last week demonstrated, there is actually a solid advantage to the new arrangement of the Columbia River Crossing, which would include light rail but no toll booths.
Just why the folks in the governor’s office in Olympia would want to punish Vancouver is not clear; maybe they’d suspect it of disloyalty in Oregon-Washington games, or think the mayor of Vancouver can’t name the Washington state rock. After all, there are still different theories about why the folks in New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s office decided to punish Fort Lee by shutting down toll booths to the George Washington Bridge, creating a traffic jam extending approximately to Ohio.
This happened in September, but has just become an issue now, because the people caught in the traffic jam have just gotten to work.
The episode, inevitably labelled “Bridgegate” – although there’s a much more satisfying rhythm to “Bridge Over Troubled Watergate” – is now being minutely examined for its implications for Christie’s 2016 presidential campaign. (The first seems to be that he should not expect to carry Fort Lee.) But there are deeper – or, since we’re talking bridges, higher – implications for national transportation infrastructure policy.
From now on, debates over tolled bridges will have to include the prospects of malevolent lane arrangement. After the nine-year, $180 million history of the proposed Oregon-Washington megabridge, suddenly CRC brings to mind Chris (R) Christie.
True, in the long history of interstate tolled bridgeworks – over the Hudson, the Delaware, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, not to mention the Columbia – this has never actually come up before. No previous governor’s office – going back to the time when you had to pay a higher toll for extra oxen – has thought it would be a political master stroke to immobilize thousands of its citizens, and voters, in four hours of traffic.
Maybe it could only have come up in a state where the drivers consider themselves lucky not to be thrown off the bridge. In the more genteel Pacific Northwest, sending three lanes of traffic through a single toll booth might have caused deepened gridlock from drivers urging each other to go first.
But when you’re designing a nearly $3 billion bridge to last decades, you have to allow for all possibilities – including this new, not previously considered situation. While we’re still in the endless study stage of the CRC, planners need to remember that the original explanation for leaving drivers on the Fort Lee bridge on-ramps long enough to qualify for legal residency was a traffic study.
Even last week, during his two-hour sorry-but-not-at-all-my-fault press conference, Christie was still claiming that maybe there had actually been a traffic study. It wasn’t clear exactly what might have been studied, except maybe the effect of long-term motionlessness on blood pressure.
So as we proceed on our own bridge, we are advised to be careful about bridge
traffic studies, especially traffic studies when the traffic doesn’t move. And the George Washington Bridge experience suggests that it’s a good idea, as the current CRC plan provides, to leave out the toll booths, which might make vengeful traffic planning a little more challenging.
Without toll booths, with commuters just rolling across the bridge with transponders in their cars, someone in the Washington governor’s office upset at Vancouver would have nothing obvious to block off. If Christie’s people had been obliged to obstruct traffic by parking large vehicles in freeway lanes – or by hacking into thousands of transponders – they might have reconsidered the whole idea.
Politicians, like bridges, need to stay connected. Both of them can come loose, in one case because the tolling revenue comes up short, in the other because politicians start to read and believe too many stories about how they should be president. Either way, things tend to come apart.
Vindictive traffic strategies on the other side of the country might seem a remote lesson for Northwesterners to consider as they contemplate a design for their own toll bridge. But Chris Christie has now given us a whole new infrastructure insight to remember:
Ask not for whom the traffic pattern tolls. It could toll for thee.
Especially if you’ve somehow annoyed the governor’s office.