Tolling ugly secret: They don’t even need the $$

By Taxpayers Association of Oregon
OregonWatchdog.com

If tolling happens in Oregon it will cost you dearly, but ODOT may not even need the money.

One average estimate puts the money collected form the Interstate-205 toll to be $21 million annually.  If we roughly factor in the Interstate-5 toll to be among the same cost, then Oregon’s massive new, highly disruptive, very expensive tolling project would bring in more than $40 million every year just for the tolls within Oregon.  ODOT has an annual budget of $2.5 billion.   Tolling would amount to around 1.6% of their budget.

Is it worth grinding traffic to a halt and soaking car drivers with nearly a thousand dollars of extra expenses annually, just so ODOT can get a 1% bump in their budget?

Tolling is not going to build anything new but just pay for roads and bridges already built.

Wasn’t Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill supposed to help transportation projects?

Isn’t Oregon gas tax already scheduled to up again in 2024?

What is about that 1% budget bump that ODOT can’t live without?

The answer is that ODOT doesn’t need the money but they do need to address the traffic problem.  Their solution is to effectively force people out of their cars with high tolls as crude way to reduce traffic.  This also nicely fits many liberal political goals of moving towards a more car-free utopia.   It will cost car drivers dearly, some a thousand dollars a year, it will increase traffic and it will low income people and the Middle Class the worst.

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