You roll, they'll toll

We haven't heard too much about road tolls on Oregon highways lately, but you know they're coming. Governor Kohoutek made a splash back in May when she ordered the state transportation bureaucrats not to collect any tolls until 2026. But that was just to lull people to sleep. You can bet they're moving full speed ahead in setting the infernal things up, and they'll likely be starting the shakedown as soon as '26 gets here. It's probably more of a deadline than anything else.

The guv's order exempted the bridges on I-5 and I-205 between Portland and Vancouver, Washington, but the plan wasn't to start tolling them until spring 2026, anyway. It'll probably be something like $3 a pop to cross one of those spans. There's no telling what it will cost to cruise along on I-5 or I-205, and the bureaucrats are looking at some other "corridors," too. I would think Highway 26 west of downtown would be a prime candidate to join in the fun.

Between the two bridges, I gather they enable around 300,000 crossings on a weekday, and maybe 200,000 on a weekend day. At $3 a crossing, my crude math puts the haul from the tolls on the two bridges alone at something like $250 million a year. That ain't hay.

As a sort of sideshow to this, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the rookie Republican Congressperson from Schraderland, has dropped a bill into the hopper in the House that would require a long federal study before any new tolls could be implemented just abut anywhere in the country. Her legislation will go nowhere, of course, but LCD is at that precious "I introduced a bill" stage of her career. The reps from the East Coast, where tolls are collected everywhere and have been since the dawn of time, will chuckle and smile politely for two seconds before round-filing their copy.

What may be the funniest part of the whole thing is that if you don't sign up for an electronic tracker to put in your vehicle, cameras are going to be the way the tolls are enforced. Given how many cars are parading around Portland every day with no license plates, or deliberately obscured license plates, and given that there is virtually no enforcement of any traffic rules in the city, there are going to be quite a few scofflaws who won't have to pay. Unless the Portland police go back to work, which I doubt will be happening between now and 2026. Only the law-abiding suckers will be bled.

The tolls on the interstate bridges won't be too much of a bother to me. If I go over one of them after 2025, it will probably be a one-way trip.

But it'll still be a sad day when they start charging. One of the things that attracted me to the West Coast were the marvelous networks of freeways. They won't be free too much longer.