Got the HOTs?
By Robert W. Poole, Jr.
Nearly a decade of experience in San
Diego and Orange County,
Calif., has shown that you can keep traffic
flowing smoothly, at the speed limit, even during the busiest rush hours. How? Charge
a toll, varying by the density of traffic in the lane, for drivers to use the
high-occupancy vehicle lanes (HOV). These high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes-on 1-15 in San
Diego and SR 91 in Orange County-have been a big hit
with drivers in all income groups.
The next step is to apply this to mass transit. The idea is
to reserve a portion of an HOV lane for buses and
vanpools, while selling the remainder of the lane's capacity to motorists at
market prices. The' result is a virtual exclusive busway-a
VEB.
A single lane can handle 1,700 vehicles an hour without
congestion. In every metro area but New York,
however, it would be very difficult to fill enough buses to operate more often
than one per minute (60 per hour). There's room for about 1,6
additional payinj.:-cars per hour without interfering
with the high-speed flow of buses and vanpools. That's a lot of toll revenue-in
some cases enough to pay the cost of building an additional lane.
A VEB would be a better use of
costly new highway lanes than two-person carpools. Most carpoolers turn out to
be family members who would travel together anyway, so they don't reduce the
number of cars by very much. We can make lemonade out of these lemons by
converting HOV lanes to super-HOT lanes, dedicating a
portion of their capacity to express bus service.
This is not pie-in-the-sky. Houston
is already adding four HOT lanes in the median of the Katy Freeway(1-10),
with part of their capacity reserved permanently for buses, vanpools and
three-person carpools. Toll rates will be charged and kept high enough to limit
other car traffic to what is compatible with uncongested
conditions.
The moral of the story: VEBs are a
good deal for hard-pressed transit agencies-and an even better deal for
taxpayers.
Mr. Poole is director of transportation studies at the
Reason Foundation.
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