Turns out, I-405 tolls are failing

It was just a year ago that new tools on Interstate 405 caused a public uproar. Democrat politicians from Jay Inslee to State Rep. Roget Good man ran scurrying from responsibility, pretending they wanted to fix the situation, as Shift noted.

Now the Everett Herald is reporting that the tolls are failing in their most basic mission of improving travel times on the I-405 corridor, writing “tolls on I-405 are hitting the maximum $10 posted rate almost daily…but one year into the experiment, the lanes are failing a second key standard. Traffic within the lanes is now moving at 45 mph or faster just 85 percent of the time. That’s below the required 90 percent threshold, which the state had been meeting across the 17-mile tolling corridor until June.”

So the state is charging up to $10 per trip for drivers to use car pool lanes they had already paid for (through gas tax revenue), but travel times have worsened. But do not despair, the transportation bureaucrats are on it.

“‘We’re looking at a whole host of things to try to address that,’ said Patty Rubstello, toll operations director for the Washington State Department of Transportation, during a Nov. 16 presentation to the Washington State Transportation Commission, which sets toll rates. ‘We want to look at any operational things that we can further refine out there to bring that back up.’”

Looking at everything, except undoing the tolling fiasco which created the problem in the first place.