In his 2026 Supplemental Transportation Budget proposal, Washington state Gov. Bob Ferguson wants to borrow $2.1 billion for maintenance and preservation of roads and bridges, and to speed up ferry construction to replace aging ferries.
Washington already has the highest per-resident debt in the region, owing approximately $15,400 per capita, making it the 11th highest in the nation. While more maintenance and preservation dollars are needed, a significant amount would go to add-ons like bike lanes on highways in lieu of preserving the system that carries the most traffic.
Public officials have continually allowed roads to crumble and reach “the early stages of critical failure,” per the Washington State Department of Transportation, saying more than $1.5 billion is needed per year just to keep the road network in a state of good repair. Other independent sources rank Washington state highway performance at 47th in the nation, with low rankings due to high spending per road-mile and poor urban arterial and rural interstate pavement conditions.
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, only 70% of road miles in Washington are deemed to be “acceptable.” The national average is 81% and neighboring Idaho is rated at 94%.
Yet despite the Governor’s latest proposal to increase maintenance and preservation spending, officials note in the fine print above that some preservation money will be diverted to “Complete Streets,” a program to increase cycling infrastructure in urban areas.
The note states: “It is assumed that approximately 50% of the additional Highways Preservation dollars provided by Move Ahead Washington … will be needed to implement the Complete Streets proposal in conjunction with those projects.”
The previous head of WSDOT, Roger Millar, said something similar when the legislature passed SB 5974, and noted that spending highway preservation money on other modes of transportation comes at a cost to pavement and bridge work. His opinion was that it was worth it.
As quoted in the Urbanist blog (emphasis mine): “Our preservation program will include investments that close those [bike and pedestrian network] gaps…but that will result in money being spent on those facilities as opposed to stretching the money out to do more pavement and more bridge work,” Millar said. “I think that’s consistent with taking a multimodal approach. Again, a quarter of [Washington residents] don’t drive. We need facilities in a state of good repair as well.”
State officials need to better preserve the $239 billion in public assets they are stewards of, and spending more on preservation and bridges is a good step in that direction. Yet when officials divert road and bridge money to other, less-popular modes of transportation or costly electrification upgrades to ferries, the preservation backlog will continue to grow, further degrading safety, road performance, and Washington’s economy.
Bob Pishue is a policy analyst for the Mountain States Policy Center, an independent research organization based in Idaho, Montana, Eastern Washington and Wyoming. Online at mountainstatespolicy.org.
