In North Texas, traffic congestion is one of the most pressing quality of life issues and we annually rank in the top 10 for time spent in congested traffic. While it seems quite obvious to everyone that more lanes would be a step in the right direction, the trend of the last three decades has been a marked increase in HOV lanes, and more recently, high-occupancy toll lanes (HOT), and express lanes. In other words, the solution proposed by politicians has been fewer lanes for regular commuters. Initially, restricted use lanes were sold to the public as a solution for traffic congestion by encouraging carpooling; in more recent years, HOV lanes have been used as perk to get people to switch to hybrid cars, in the name of a cleaner environment; On both counts HOV lanes have been a failure. The only thing they seem to accomplish is to server as an alternative revenue stream for the government.
Questions answered in this article:
- Has traffic congestion decreased in cities that have most aggressively implemented HOV/HOT lanes?
- Do HOV/HOT lanes increase the number of people carpooling?
- How does an HOV culture affect the motivations of government agencies?
The first thing that jumps out about restricted use lanes is that part of their rationale is that we cannot simply expand existing highways to accommodate more traffic. That's interesting considering that many HOV and HOT lanes actually are brand new lanes that are built over or alongside existing lanes in the extra space that civil engineers long ago designed into the infrastructure as a way to allow for future expansion. So, they're telling us that they can't build new lanes, and then they build new lanes, only they're special lanes not regular ones. So we cannot ease congestion by building more roads, but we can ease congestion by building "special" roads? It takes a certain kind of person, be it a politician, a bureaucrat, or an activist to fail to see just how ridiculous that sounds.
In other instances, those in charge of HOV projects re-designate existing lanes for HOV, HOT, express lane purposes. I might not be the brightest guy around, but we cannot lessen existing congestion with more lanes, but we can do it with fewer? It seems that the goal is not to ease overall congestion, but to ease congestion for groups who behave in a manner that the government approves of like those who carpool, purchase hybrid vehicles, or take public transportation.
Let's apply this same reasoning to another aspect of life. Voting is important, but I think we can all agree that voting is also kind of a pain, what with the long lines and all. Imagine that politicians figured that since the population was going to keep growing, there was no way to designate new polling stations. Instead we would just have a hybrid model of new pay to vote polling stations, with shorter lines, alongside the old polling stations. How congested would polling stations be today? So few people would pay to vote, so really you'd have an underutilized "express" voting line, and more traffic in the regular voting lines. Naturally, there is a big difference between voting (an inherent right) and driving to work, but you see my point. By creating special lanes for special people, everyone pays for the road twice; the guy with money when he pays to use the special lane and the regular guy who pays with his time by being stuck in worse traffic in a regular lane.
The fundamental falsehood of HOV lanes is that they encourage carpooling and thereby relieve congestion by reducing the number of vehicles on the roadway. The problem is that it is a failed idea. The reality is that we often have a perfectly good lane taken away and transformed into a special lane, resulting in more traffic overall, yet this still doesn't encourage enough people to carpool (drive hybrids, etc.) to produce a net benefit.
To take one example, HOV-Nirvana Los Angeles County, the number of people who carpool has fell roughly 8% between 1997 and 2009, despite an increase in both population and the number of HOV lanes available. Over roughly the same time period, Los Angelinos have gone from spending 53 hours a year in traffic, to 61 hours a year in traffic.
Across the country carpooling peaked at 15.5% of commuters in 1990. Coincidentally, that was the year Congress began permitting the use of federal highway dollars for HOV lanes. Ignoring whether it is desirable for the government to encourage carpooling, the drop-off in actual carpooling, despite government incentives, should at least demonstrate that it is not an idea the public is interested in. On a more practical level, if I have to drive 5 or 10 minutes out of my way to pick up and drop off a someone who carpools with me, versus sitting in an extra 5 to 10 minutes of traffic, what do I really gain from carpooling?
Depending on the year, Washington, D.C. traffic is often rated as the worst in the country and no city outside of Los Angeles has embraced restricted lanes with the same zeal as the D.C. suburbs, specifically, northern Virginia. The region has had HOV lanes in one form or another since the 1970s and has quickly become a leader in HOT lane mileage. While the HOT lanes on the Capital Beltway have been constructed from scratch, Virginia is currently planning to re-designate existing lanes on I-66 as HOTs. These lanes, now free, will cost an average of $17 dollars per day for a round trip under the current proposal, or up to $9,000 a year. In this instance, the government cannot fix traffic problems with more lanes, but it can take away lanes and give them to a politically favored group? Such thinking defies basic logic, unless your goal is to raise revenue, not ease traffic jams.
Supporters of HOTs and express lanes defend them on the grounds that the revenue they generate allows for future improvements to roads. If I understand their thinking correctly, we need to take money raised by gasoline taxes now, so that we can build new toll lanes, to raise money to build new roads later. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I don't know the first thing about urban planning or transportation networks, but maybe we could just build extra lanes now, not charge for them, and use future tax revenue to build new roads in the future. I know it's not as clever as the plans that restricted-use lane proponents have put forward, but it might just actually alleviate some of the problems of traffic congestion.
The most damning evidence that restricted use lanes are a means to control behavior are the exemptions that many alternative fuel vehicles receive. In fact, one of the sources of opposition to the Virginia plan is that it will do away with toll exemptions for hybrid vehicles. So we started out trying restricted lanes in an effort to relieve traffic congestion and now single-occupant vehicles get to use these lanes as long as they have the right power source? I suppose you could argue that such vehicles are better for the environment and therefore they are deserving of special considerations, but any favorable environmental impact gained by driving a hybrid is more than offset by the thousands of other drivers sitting stuck in the traffic created by sacrificing a perfectly good lane to let a small handful of people zip by in their cars that run on good intentions.
However, since hybrid cars have never made up even 3% of the United States market, it would make a lot more sense to find ways to get the other 97% of vehicles moving faster. Even the most efficient cars get pretty bad gas mileage in stop and go traffic; accelerating a car from a stop many times over sucks down way more fuel than cruising at highway speeds. But it can actually be worse than that. As an experiment, ask a friend or coworker the following question:
If pushing your car hard uses more gas than sitting at idle, and your car gets, say, 30 mpg at highway speeds, what MPG does it get when parked in your driveway running at idle?
Most people will intuitively say, "Well, since pushing the car hard gets 30 mpg, surely sitting there at idle uses far less gas, so I'd guess that a car at idle gets about 50 or 60 MPG." The answer, however, is zero. Zero miles per gallon. If a car isn't going anywhere, then it is burning less fuel than a car screaming down the highway, but it's also not driving any miles. It's doing nothing of consequence with the fuel that is being burned. It's creating pollution, yet no utility is being derived.
By slowing traffic down, not taking advantage of all of the available space on a highway, HOV lanes are contributing to more pollution in the sense that so many cars are burning gas for longer and burning it harder as they repeatedly accelerate. But what's worse than a greater volume of pollution being produced is that it's largely pointless pollution. Every second that someone sits there with their car idling, they're burning dinosaur juice for no good reason. If I cut down a forest a build a bunch of houses with the wood, most reasonable people would say that yields a net good that offsets the "harm" done to the environment. But if I cut down a forest and then just let it rot, that is arguably the worst kind of environmental harm. Folks, that's what I'm suggesting that HOV lanes actually accomplish. They cause more fuel to be consumed in vain.
All of this affects North Texans, because the long-term plans for our highways relies on increased construction of restricted lanes. It would be foolish to think that these measures, which have failed in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. will be any more successful in Texas. Moreover, roads already have multiple sources of funding in Texas. From traditional sources such as gas taxes and general budget revenue, to new funding from Proposition 1 passed last year, which diverts "Rainy Day Fund" surpluses to highway projects. There is no need for another funding mechanism for Texas roads, although I certainly see why various state-level bureaucracies would want one.
Aside from not fixing the problem of traffic congestion, the danger of toll roads and paid restricted lanes comes from the fact that it will empower transportation bureaucracies to raise money without consent of our elected representatives. This is not to deny the oversight role that the legislature will still play. However, a bureaucracy with an independent revenue stream shifts the agency's priorities away from solving transportation problems to increasing its own sources of revenue, that is how you end up with Virginia's crazy $17 dollar coomute. It may sound alarmist to suggest that we will be paying $40 in tolls to drive to the airport, like you have to do in some areas around New York City, but their toll system began with a similarly limited scope. Heck, the New Jersey Turnpike was supposed to pay for the construction of New Jersey's portion of I-95, and almost a half a century later, after paying for the construction of the road many times over, it seems the State of New Jersey does not see any reason to give up what it believes to be its money.
It is completely understandable that 30 years ago, governments around the country experimented with HOV lanes in an effect to reduce congestion and pollution. Local governments should be trying new ideas to solve issues that affect all of us. However, it makes absolutely no sense for governments to implement 30-year-old ideas, which have never lessened congestion or pollution, discourage the behavior (carpooling) they are meant to promote, and misallocate highway funds, for the purpose, not of creating new highways, but creating new highway revenue.
You're probably wondering why a personal injury firm cares at all about HOV lanes. The answer is simple. More congestion leads to more accidents, which we'll cover in part two of this article.