Posts about Carpooling

Roads are a very flexible form of transportation, but are inefficient in their use of space. Each car takes up a lot of room. The New York Subway's 22 tracks carry as many people as at least 167 lanes of car tunnels would.

If people drove evenly throughout the day, the road network would work optimally, but they don't. Buses and trains work better for moving people in a shorter time period to a small number of locations, because they cost more to run but can fit more people in a smaller space.

There are ways to make the road more efficient. More people could occupy each car. That's the logic behind the HOV rules and slugging on I-395 and other roads. Thanks to slugging and high bus volume, 95/395 is one of the most efficient roadways for its size in the nation (but will actually get less efficient with HOT lanes).

Instead of pushing more carpooling, VDOT actually waived the HOV restrictions on its freeways on Tuesday. That doesn't make a lot of sense. It's like they just threw their hands up and said, "Wow, earthquake! Let's just ignore everything we do to make our roads work better!"

If we knew ahead of time that we'd have to evacuate DC in a hurry one day, but didn't know when, we might actually plan for stricter HOV restrictions than usual. Take a few main arteries and make them exclusively HOV-3 or HOV-4 for the evacuation. Ask workers and residents to find "evacuation buddies" who work in the same office or live in the same inner neighborhood. These people would share the car when evacuation time came.

Once those carpools get to suburban residential areas, people will have to get home, but depending on the type of disaster, just getting everyone out might be most critical. The drivers can give rides that one time to their passengers, or they can wait in places like libraries for family members to pick them up.

Buses could also use the HOV roads, allowing them to travel much faster back to commuter lots and make a return trip to pick up even more people.

Not surprisingly, advocates for more roads and sprawl, like the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, immediately jumped on the issue to call for new Potomac River bridges as part of their long attempts to build an Outer Beltway. Such bridges wouldn't actually alleviate existing traffic congestion, but would instead just drive more sprawl development and make the evacuation challenge that much harder.

During the earthquake, Ezra Klein cleverly tweeted, "This earthquake has clear policy implications that back up my previously held political opinions." That's certainly true for NVTA.

I actually learned something from the earthquake that doesn't back up previously-held opinions: we can't count on Metrorail for an emergency. Especially with today's safety concerns, Metro is going to err on the side of limiting its operations in unusual circumstances. That's probably the right move if it's not a matter of life and death. But it means we need to think about evacuations another way.

We also need to think about when evacuations are necessary. Often they're not. One of the best things the federal government can do is not to send everyone home at the exact same time. Instead, the response from OPM seems to be to pull the "everyone go home" handle at any sign of trouble. We know that this causes gridlock.

DDOT Director Terry Bellamy said at a press briefing, "You can never build your way out of an event. I know there was a lot of talk about building more bridges across to Virginia, buidling more bridges into Maryland, but you never know where the event is going to occur," the WBJ reported.

Transportation Planning Board coordinator Ron Kirby told the Post, "Not only can [sending everyone home at once] not be done, we should not try it. ... If you give [people] very good timely information, they are going to make their own decisions in ways, in general, that are going to be better for them and better for the system as a whole."

Kirby also faults Metro for not communicating more; he might not have been on Twitter, because they actually did an excellent job of communicating there. They also sent multiple press releases out over their press list throughout the afternoon and evening. If you were at a train station or on a bus, was communication good or bad there?

The best way of all to get home after a major event like an earthquake? Walk or bike, if you can.

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.

This penalty doesn't apply if Fluor-Transurban makes a 12.98% profit, but the more drivers carpool, the less likely it is they will make that profit.

As for buses, it remains unclear from the agreement whether or not they will cost the same as a car, or more. In Section 4.04:

(iv) The toll rates shall be the same for persons using the HOT Lanes under like conditions, and for this purpose "like conditions" may take into consideration type, weight and occupancy of the vehicle, number of axles, time-of-day and/or day-of-week travel, time and location of entry to the HOT Lanes, traffic congestion and other traffic conditions (provided, that the Concessionaire may adopt and implement discount programs for different classes or groups of persons using the HOT Lanes under like conditions, subject to the provisions of Section 11.01; and, provided further, that it is understood that, with dynamic tolling vehicles traveling on the same Toll Section of the HOT Lanes at the same time may be subject to different toll rates);

Buses weigh more and have more axles. If this provision allows for buses to be charged at higher rates, then bus trips could cost even more.

Ultimately, under this contract, if Virginia is too successful in reducing carbon footprint and traffic, or invests enough in express bus service, its taxpayers will instead be punished.