Posts about HOT Lanes

In recent years, planners in Virginia have begun to seriously consider a Tysons-centric rapid transit network. It doesn't have a name, and isn't officially separate from any of the other transportation planning going on in the region, but it shows up on long range regional plans like SuperNoVa and TransAction.

In addition to the Silver Line, HOT Lanes Buses, and Tysons' internal circulation network, officials are beginning to study light rail connections to Maryland, Falls Church, and Merrifield, and BRT on the Chain Bridge Road corridor.

It will be years before any of these additional routes are implemented, and they could look very different from this map once they finally are. Details don't exist yet, because at this point these are little more than ideas.

But to work as the urban place Fairfax County officials hope Tysons will become, this is the sort of regional infrastructure it's going to need.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

VDOT showed 4 "packages" of changes at 2 public meetings, along with stats for how each would likely affect travel times, traffic volumes, and more.

Package 1, which would make the existing lanes of I-66 into HOT lanes, free for vehicles with 3 or more people and tolled for 1 and 2, brings almost as much benefit as Package 2, which would add a 3rd lane on top of that. But package 1 costs about $350-650 million less.

Allen Muchnick of the Arlington Coalition for Sensible Transportation was one of the stakeholders in Tuesday's meeting, and got to see the draft final report. It lists the following metrics for packages 1 and 2, plus another option called a "sensitivity test," which tried only applying tolls during the peak period where I-66 is HOV-only today.

Here are the key metrics. The "Pkg 1 + ST" column reflects this new option from the sensitivity test.

Metric	Pkg 1	Pkg 1 + ST	Pkg 2
Daily Person Miles Traveled	+40,490 (0.8%)	+318,388 (5.4%)	+267,509 (4.6%)
Person Throughput Measure	+5,632 (1.2%)	+27,669 (6.1%)	+24,098 (5.3%)
Peak Period Congested VMT	+10,726 (2.8%)	+11,230 (2.9%)	-65,164 (-16.9%)
Transit Ridership	+1,423 (1.1%)	+2,568 (1.9%)	+2,124 (1.6%)
Added Capital Cost	$33M	$33M	$345-695M
Added Operating Cost	$23M	$23M	$25M

This new option, tolling at peak times, appears to move more people by both car and transit than the widening, yet saves hundreds of millions of dollars. Even without this option, it's likely that widening the road at such cost, and with all the disruption it will cause, is not worth gaining only a few percentage points of extra movement.

The metric of "peak period congested VMT" measures the wrong thing. This is the amount of vehicle miles traveled that happen in an uncongested road. But congetion, per se, is not the problem; a short drive in traffic is better than a long drive without it. The goal is to move people, or more accurately, get people where they need to be.

There were plenty of flaws with this study from the start. This assumes, as the "baseline," that Virginia has implemented every change in the regional Constrained Long-Range Plan (CLRP). That includes adding the 3 "spot improvements," which would already widen I-66 in several places; and changing I-66 to HOV-3 and assuming that nobody cheats the HOV restrictions.

The CLRP also includes some projects which will help in the I-66 corridor but have no funding today, like lengthening all Metro trains to 8 cars and adding new bus service in the area. Hopefully these will happen, but there's no guarantee.

A better study would have used today as the baseline, and looked at the CLRP changes like the "spot improvements" as some of the options. After all, if another change helps more, it's far from too late to build that instead. We would also then be able to better see the effects of this phantom bus service, though I'm told the full report does provide more detail on the effects of these proposals.

BeyondDC reminded me yesterday about a flowchart I made back in 2009. I've updated it slightly:

Is the urge to widen I-66 coming from engineers who can't shake the paving habit, or political pressure from above? If a transportation agency is unwilling to actually recommend anything other than widening, regardless of what a study shows, then that study really is the sham as people accused, and I feared, at the time, and VDOT might as well change its name to Virginia Department Of Paving Your Community.

Escalator reliability reaches 100%: Metro has achieved a new milestone for escalator maintenance. They have now reached a reliability rate of 100%; all escalators are currently broken at the same time. (Examiner, Matt Johnson)

Hop on I-395 PE: With Virginia's new program to sell naming rights to roads, Sudafed has proposed sponsoring all of Northern Virginia's congestion. (WBJ, Steve Offutt)

LOV-0 coming to a road near you: Google is reportedly working on a new program to design "passengerless cars," which will transport no people at all. In anticipation of this breakthrough, VDOT announced a plan to implement "Low-Occupancy Vehicle" lanes for their exclusive use. (Wired, Neil Flanagan)

DC4D4Thomas: DC for Democracy has endorsed Harry Thomas, Jr. as a write-in candidate for the Ward 5 special election. Members cited Thomas' consistency in talking about revitalizing the ward's main streets without making anything happen, creatively moving around money dedicated to serve youth, and his plan to solve transportation problems by setting up a series of Audi dealerships. (Geoff Hatchard)

Norton targets Wyoming: After several unsuccessful efforts to lobby state legislatures to support DC statehood, Eleanor Holmes Norton announced a new strategy to try to remove statehood from Wyoming, as it is smaller than DC. (DCist, Nick Clark)

Therefore, Transurban's natural profit motive will be to fill up the lanes as much as possible, but only until traffic slows down to the point where people stop paying for the extra benefit. If that means that the carpools and buses are driving 10 miles per hour slower than they do today, well, those carpools and buses aren't their customers. They're not paying tolls. So who cares?

Arlington asked VDOT to include a provision in the contract forcing Transurban to manage the road to keep traffic flowing at the speed limit, 55 inside the Beltway and 65 outside. But VDOT refused.

Instead, they lowered the target speed to 45 miles per hour. That's the lowest permitted for a "transit facility" receiving federal funding, which 95/395 HOV lanes qualify as because of the high volume of buses.

In short, with this project, the state of Virginia is planning to lower the speed of travel on 95 and 395 in the special lanes.

If each bus takes longer to travel up and down 95 and 395, Northern Virginia governments will have to buy more buses and pay people to drive them at huge cost. That dwarfs any money Arlington has spent on this lawsuit. It'll also make transit a less appealing mode of travel, cutting down on ridership.

Myth 4: Arlington sued "rather than press for solutions."

The Washington Post knew about this and other problems. That didn't stop them from penning a bizarre editorial last Friday:

There were legitimate questions about the project, including whether solo drivers would clog the so-called high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes and what to do decades from now if the project's engineering, traffic or financial projections turn out to have been miscalculated. After all, the state would cede control of the project to the private partnership, potentially leaving taxpayers will little recourse.

Rather than press for solutions, however, Arlington did its best to halt progress, and it succeeded.

In other words, it's unseemly for a county to sue to block a road project no matter how intransigent the state has been or how many big problems crop up with the project's structure. The overwhelming need to build roads, no matter the cost, trumps all.

But as letters from county officials bear out, Arlington avidly tried to press for solutions. The problem was that VDOT ignored them and the Bush Administration gave them a Categorical Exclusion, granting a free pass to ignore those questions.

Pressing for solutions is exactly what this letter from Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria was doing. It asked for specific answers to very specific questions, including the bus speeds and many more.

Myth 5: VDOT didn't move ahead with the lanes because the lawsuit was blocking their ability to proceed.

The Post editorial also claimed Arlington "succeeded" in blocking progress. Did it really?

State officials told us back in 2009 why they stopped the project:

"This is not a good time to be bringing forward a project like this," said Virginia Transportation Secretary Pierce Homer, who said the cost of debt financing and the amount of equity required would have been too great to immediately move forward.

He said community concerns about traffic on Seminary Road and at the Shirlington rotary also weighed into the decision.

The lawsuit appears nowhere in Homer's explanation. In fact, the lawsuit hadn't even been filed at the time. Virginia didn't move ahead because the financing didn't work.

And InsideNova reported, "Homer also stated that planners will take additional time to examine concerns posed by Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax."

Unfortunately, that's not what they did. Faced with a fiscally impossible project, local and state Republican leaders instead spent a year taking political potshots at liberal Arlington to score personal points.

A big part of the project's fiscal difficulty came from the design inside the Beltway. There, given the dense neighborhoods the road travels through, the design called for adding a third lane inside the footprint of the existing roadway.

That would have narrowed lanes, removed shoulders, and violated Interstate standards in a number of ways that would have required federal waivers. It also would have created some expensive construction work.

By cutting out the 395 portion, VDOT didn't appease Arlington. What they did was to delete the expensive piece of their project, giving the rest more of a reasonable chance for financing.

Americans want better transportation but don't want to pay for it. HOT lanes are a clever gimmick to get something built without paying for it, but it doesn't quite work. Except where roads had been built with giant medians ready-made for HOT lanes, the tolls still don't cover construction costs.

Myth 6: Fairfax and Prince William Counties support the project.

Fairfax does conditionally support it, but has many concerns as outlined in the above letter. Prince William passed a resolution opposing the project as proposed, and actually considered joining the lawsuit.

"Some are worried about giving false hope to commuters that the suit will be successful, but from my perspective, we need to proceed," Prince William Chairman Corey Stewart told the WBJ. "If there is a chance of slowing them down or reducing the negative impact, we have to do everything we can."

That's right, back in 2009 people were discussing this issue based on the merits, since a Democratic governor was pushing it and other Democratic leaders opposing it. Then, suddenly a Republican governor got elected and it turned into a partisan issue.

Now it's Fairfax Republican Pat Herrity and ultra-conservative Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli leading the charge, even after the lawsuit was dropped. Scoring political points was too much of a temptation even once the issue became moot.

The principal criticism of the lawsuit has always been that the lawsuit calls people racists. Herrity charged, "[Arlington] even resorted to claims of racism and sued a federal worker for personal damages—a dangerous precedent for all our federal, state and local government workers just doing their jobs. And because of Arlington's actions, the commonwealth is pulling the plug on the HOT lanes project inside the Beltway."

We already know that last part is false. What about the rest of it? That'll be the subject for our last and final installment.

Answers: They're all false.

Virginia has been eagerly pursuing projects to build HOT lanes, such as on the Beltway. HOT lanes are separated lanes which carpoolers and buses can use for free, but solo drivers can also use for a toll.

On the Beltway, these are new lanes. By charging a toll, theoretically the project can make back much of the cost of construction. To accomplish this, the state has contracted the lanes out to a private consortium, Fluor-Transurban, which will build the lanes, then operate them and keep the profits.

However, charging tolls on lanes doesn't quite pay for building them. Therefore, the contract also includes extra payments from the state, a pernicious provision that if more than 24% of vehicles are the carpoolers or buses not paying a toll, Virginia has to pay a penalty, and other problems.

In theory, a network of roads with HOT lanes has some advantages, though the cost of building many new freeway lanes would be better spent on transit. But if we could go back in time and reconfigure every freeway to have some HOT lanes as part of their original design, we'd at least be able to run a fast network of buses around the region, and encourage carpooling.

We do have one such example to look to: the existing 95/395. Here, there already is a set of HOV lanes, originally built as bus-only lanes (the "Shirley Busway,") then converted to HOV as well as bus. This corridor "is recognized by the transportation community as the most successful HOV facility in the United States today," according to a VDOT study.

The "slugging" system encourages many people who might otherwise drive alone to instead carpool. That means that far more people are traveling per car than elsewhere. Likewise, many very successful, heavily-ridden commuter buses ply the corridor, and riders enjoy a speedy trip thanks to the lanes.

This makes the 95/395 project fundamentally different from others. Instead of considering a new facility, this project would take the existing one, convert it from HOV to HOT by allowing solo drivers on with a toll, and widen it by one lane.

How would this affect the existing HOV performance? Would buses go faster or slower? Would fewer people slug?

The biggest question is, would 3 HOT lanes move more people than 2 HOV lanes? It's not totally clear. Some people would switch to paying the toll instead. If only 1/3 of the 3-passenger HOV cars instead become 3 separate drivers paying tolls, those people could all fill up the new lane with single-passenger cars without the road moving a single extra person than before. The same goes if even a relatively small fraction of bus riders switch to paying the toll.

That would all be great for these companies, since Fluor would get money from the state to build the road, and then Transurban would get money from the tolls. It wouldn't be good for Virginians, though. People would be paying more for the same trip, air quality would decline, the commuter bus operators would lose riders, and the road wouldn't be any better than before.

Or maybe it would be better. If VDOT did an analysis, local governments could either know their fears were founded, or not. For example, an earlier VDOT study of switching 95/395 from HOV-3 to HOV-2 concluded that, at least without new lanes, allowing 2-passenger carpools would increase the number of cars using the road but decrease the overall number of people the road moves each day.

VDOT did an environmental analysis for the Beltway HOT lanes. However, 10 days before the end of the Bush administration, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) gave a "categorical exclusion" allowing Virginia to simply skip this analysis altogether.

And this is why Arlington sued.

Myth 1: Arlington's lawsuit asked VDOT to cancel the I-395 segment of the HOT lane project.

Arlington was asking VDOT not to cancel any particular part of the project, but rather to perform the required analysis before moving ahead. VDOT refused, and wasn't answering questions, so they brought the lawsuit to force the analysis and get some answers.

Myth 2: Arlington dropped the lawsuit because the 395 segment was deleted.

Last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton announced that VDOT would cut back the planned HOT lanes to 395. He worded the announcement in a way that made it sound like, under duress, they were acceding to Arlington's request and taking away the portion in Arlington (and Alexandria). Arlington also dropped the lawsuit last week.

To the casual observer, it sure looked like VDOT gave Arlington what they want, so they dropped the suit. And VDOT did give Arlington what they were asking for, but removing the 395 portion wasn't it.

Instead, what's significant is that VDOT agreed to actually perform an environmental analysis. They'll likely still ram through a project with some significant bad elements, but they'll at least answer a few key questions first.

Foremost among those questions is this: Will these HOT lanes actually end up moving traffic more slowly?

In the next part, we'll look at why this is a real danger.

In Friday's WAMU Politics Hour discussion with Brian Moran, Tom Sherwood joked that one of Virginia's transportation plans is to "obliterate Arlington and make a big interchange." It seems that Hugo, at least, really does see Arlington as nothing more than what's in the way of him driving to DC, and if they won't let the state ram wider roads through, he'd like to obliterate the county in the state legislature.

Instead, maybe officials should stop blaming Arlington for being dense and walkable while their own counties chose unsustainable, sprawling development patterns. Sherwood talked about how traffic is bad and how building more roads won't make it better. He said, "I'm very fatalistic about Northern Virginia traffic. I think it's always going to be bad... no matter how many roads they do or how many bicycles they buy... It seems to me that Northern Virginia is doomed because of the policies of the last 35 years."

Or, maybe the two small, oppressed jurisdictions on the Potomac should band together and try to push for statehood together. Republicans would get a redder Virginia in exchange, though it would sink their hopes of massive freeway expansions. Arlington might have a vote in the state legislature, but it's got a lot in common with DC's struggle.