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February 5, 2008
Help Advance Transportation Policy February 8
Citizens League staff and a key group of board members have been working and listening over the last four months to find out how the Citizens League can be helpful in creating a long-term, sustainable approach to our transportation funding needs as outlined in the 2005 report, "Driving Blind."
Join Citizens League board members Tom Horner, Dee Long, Kevin Goodno and Lee Anderson on Friday morning at 8:00 a.m. to help the Citizens League advance our transportation funding principles.
Driving Blind called for creating a transportation market through more choices and greater transparency in transportation funding. To do this, prices must be developed and established for those who use and derive benefit from the transportation system.
Pricing vs. Tolling: If you look at the top recommendation in the report, you will note that we did not differentiate pricing and tolling. This is because many experts simply think of pricing as a form of tolling. But let us clarify now the fundamental differences:
Tolling is never a choice. You pay a flat toll to use all lanes of the road, at all times, whether it's congested or not, and the revenue is used for building and maintaining roads, not to help provide more choices.
Free-flow pricing is a market mechanism that responds directly to the demand for free flow in a congested corridor. As proposed in Minnesota, free-flow pricing is giving solo drivers a choice to buy access to a free-flow lane (shared with transit and carpoolers) on our congested highways. There is no price when there is no congestion, and when there is congestion, solo drivers always have the choice to continue driving in the "free" lanes. Free-flow pricing will provide needed funds to support more transportation choices, particularly if it is implemented system-wide. The revenue from free-flow pricing must support choices in the corridor (or system) where it is applied.
Transparent funding mechanisms recommended in Driving Blind are all represented at the bottom of page 2 of the 2008 Transportation Policy Priorities
document that we are using with everyone who wants to discuss the Citizens League approach.
How we got here
Two years after the issuance of Driving Blind, the Citizens League proposed the idea of holding a "road pricing" summit in early 2007. From that event, Minnesota became involved in pursuing the Urban Partnership Agreement (UPA), which is based on providing multiple choices to reduce congestion. The UPA is also based somewhat on the European experience in London and Stockholm, where significant transit investments were made at the same time that pricing was implemented.
The UPA approach makes sense for building a system with more choices, but the Driving Blind report did not specify that major new transit facilities should be required to implement pricing because, unlike some other approaches, the Minnesota approach always provides a choice. London and Stockholm were implementing pricing systems where everyone has to pay to enter the center of the city, which is more like a toll. Putting a lot more into transit into central cities makes all the sense in the world when you are requiring all vehicles to pay to enter the center of the city. This will also be the model if New York City implements pricing.
Decision 1: In the Minnesota approach to free-flow pricing:
--Should new transit facilities be required to implement pricing?
--Should pricing be required whenever major new transit facilities are planned and constructed?
This arrangement would have the potential to leverage all investments to create the greatest market effect when increasing choices. Driving Blind called for the implementation of pricing whenever there were major highway investments (like the Crosstown reconstruction), but we did not arrive at this more broad and comprehensive application. If we answer the first question with a yes, then we must have sufficient revenues to build more transit facilities.
Decision 2: If we need to build more transit facilities, what position should the Citizens League take on a sales tax to fund transit? None of the more transparent funding sources that we propose in Driving Blind have been tested yet in Minnesota, so they need to be developed and implemented before we know how much funding they will provide. The Citizens League does not have a recent position on dedicating sales taxes, but we have been historically wary of dedicating the states general sources of revenue since we elect our Legislature to make those decisions. The sales tax was implemented at three cents in 1967 as a way to fund K-12 education across the state, and the Citizens League was very involved in this approach through the school funding formulas behind the "Minnesota Miracle," yet Minnesota does not dedicate the sales tax to education. So whether to support the use of a dedicated sales tax for transit remains an open policy question for the Citizens League.
Decision 3: In considering a position on the dedication of sales taxes, there are a number of conditions and decisions to make about how that could occur.
--Should the Citizens League support a dedicated sales tax if the transparent funding mechanisms that we propose are also implemented as part of a plan for regional free-flow pricing?
--Should the sales tax dedication be reconsidered after the other sources are developed (2020 sunset for example)?
--Should the sales tax be regional or statewide?
Decision 4: In the attempt to advance our principles for transportation funding, what are the best ways for the Citizens League to proceed? What are the strategies? Advancing our principles on transportation does not necessarily mean taking positions on other proposals.
If you would like to attend this meeting, please email Brian Bell at bbell@citizensleague.org.
Posted by Bob DeBoer at February 5, 2008 12:37 PM