Editorial: ODOT tolling plan is a solution with problems

The idea is congestion pricing. You would pay a toll or an additional toll for driving during peak traffic times. Technology could be used to simplify collection so you don’t have to slow down and chuck coins into a bin. There could be cameras that read your license plate or readers that detect a sticker on your car.

Congestion pricing is already permitted under Oregon law. The state has new draft rules that update the law.

There are, at least, three problems. Oregon is not going to be greener if it implements congestion pricing and the only thing it does is change when people drive. Any sort of tolling will hit low-income people harder. And there are going to be concerns about privacy depending on the technology used.

ODOT officials know that. It doesn’t make it easier though to work around them.

It does not appear that anywhere in Central Oregon is considered ripe for congestion pricing. The metric ODOT identifies as the trigger is “an Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) to Capacity ratio (AADT/C) of 9.0.” Even an ODOT spokesman struggled to put that into words more readily understandable. He did say that if you normally drive 55 mph or 65 mph on a highway and average speed dips below 45, that might be a place where the state would look at it.

We did specifically ask Wednesday if places in the Bend area cross the 9.0 threshold. There is a location at Powers Road and U.S. Highway 97, but the state is not really looking at areas triggered by signalized intersections. There are segments in the Portland metro area that it is looking at. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that when ODOT officials outlined the future of traffic on the Bend Parkway to members of the Bend City Council, the projection was for increasing congestion.

The new draft policy does better explain how congestion pricing can be connected to efforts to help the climate. It also clearly addresses issues of equity, so that efforts will be made to listen to how any change might impact minorities or low-income people.

You can read the draft policy at tinyurl.com/ODOTcongestion and there is more information at tinyurl.com/ODOTplan. You can send in comments to OHPmanager@odot.oregon.gov.