The 28 Transportation Fees Paid by Seattle Residents

Everyone’s heard of the gas tax—and with Congress debating how to pay for a big highway bill, you’ll be hearing a lot more in the coming weeks—but it’s far from the only transportation fee that Americans pay on a regular basis. Others, such as local sales taxes and vehicle fees, tend to pile up for people living in a large metro area. Even if you cared to take a strict accounting of them all, you’d be hard-pressed to track down every last one.

Unless you live in Seattle, where Douglas MacDonald, who served as transportation secretary of Washington State from 2001 to 2007, has done the dirty work for you. As part of a public comment submitted to the Puget Sound Transportation Futures Task Force, MacDonald itemized every discrete transport-related fee paid for by the average Seattle household. His goal was to put all the funding streams “equally in plain view.”