Why HOT Lanes? Because HOV Lanes Don’t Work

 The following essay is the third of a guest series on HOT lanes by Damien Newton, author of the blog Street Heat LA. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.

Back when opening HOV Lanes was the craze around the country, government officials promised commuters that these new lanes would provide congestion relief for all those who chose to carpool to work (or other destinations) and would reduce congestion for everyone else by encouraging more people to carpool.

While that may have been true at one time, as the population and vehicle miles traveled in Southern California continue to grow, it becomes less and less true every year. Last summer, federal officials reprimanded the State of California because our HOV lanes are too congested. The feds specifically noted that the problem is worse in Los Angeles and Orange counties than in the rest of the state. While handing out 85,000 stickers allowing HOV access to hybrid owners certainly didn’t help matters, CALTRANS officials stated that HOV lanes were filling up because the population was growing faster than expected. As this trend continues, even the HOV Lanes that are still providing free-flowing traffic now will get more and more congested.

CALTRANS’ first reaction to HOV overcrowding was to crack down on HOV lane cheaters. While this may provide some short term relief, even if CALTRANS managed to clear every cheat out of the lanes, the population growth would again over-crowd the lanes and lead to congestion. Of course, having a tolling system to gain entrance to HOT lanes would eliminate cheating altogether.

Some would argue that the HOV overcrowding is good news. The lanes are overcrowded because more and more people are choosing to commute in car pools and the numbers of single-occupant commuters is going down.

Unfortunately, the numbers don’t back that statement up.

The percentage of people who commute via car pooling in Los Angeles County has remained static. According to the U.S. Census, in 2002 12.8% of commuters in LA County commuted by car, but by 2006 that figure fell to 12%. Because neither 2002 nor 2006 were years when a full census was completed, the change in the percent of commuters who chose car pooling is within the margin for error of the survey. The figures for Orange County show a slight increase in both number and percent of commuters who car pool, but that figure is also within the margin for error. (I had to go to www.census.gov and do the math myself; I couldn’t find a link that had these numbers. Feel free to double check me.)

In short, despite their popularity, HOV lanes aren’t causing single passenger commuters to switch to a carpool.

Metro deserves credit for recognizing that the HOV system around Los Angeles is slowly, but surely, failing. In order to protect its investment (HOV Lanes cost a lot of money)!, and to be able to fulfill their promise of a congestion-free commute for some, Metro decided to look into HOT Lanes, i.e. converting HOV lanes into variable toll lanes with the cost depending on the number of people in the car and the time of day.

This decision has been criticized as being unfair to carpoolers, unfair to hybrid owners and unfair to those people trying to make the most responsible decisions when choosing transportation. While it’s unfortunate that LA is growing too quickly for HOV lanes to fulfill the promise of a congestion-free commute for the most-responsible of us, what would be most unfair is a government agency that sees a system that is failing and doesn’t do anything about it because the solution might be politically unpopular.

Visit Damien Newton's blog, Street Heat LA, for more on L.A. transportation matters.

Photo by Don Bartletti / LAT

Comments

[Cassandra]

Your argument doesn't hold water.

HOV lanes are working and are exceeding expectations. They are congested because more people are using them and because they are prone to more congestion problems by being one lane (on average) of freeway instead of 3-5 lanes. The solution is not to charge people for using these existing lanes, but to create more HOV lanes. If we were truly doing what is best, despite "what is politically unpopular", then we would be converting existing freeway lanes to create 2-3 lane HOV corridors.

Cal Trans offers an extensive report on HOV lanes which refutes the conclusions you have drawn here, and leads us to wonder why we do not have MORE HOV lanes (more lanes dedicated to HOV on a given stretch of freeway AND more freeways with HOV lanes - 101, 405 from the 90 to the 101, etc.)

Your arguments:

HOV Lanes do not encourage carpooling!
-- On the contrary, carpooling has risen dramatically in areas where there are HOV lanes! The census data you quote is not very useful - it doesn't compare carpooling pre- and post-HOV, nor does it break down the carpooling according to regions which do or do not have HOV Lanes. CalTrans data paints a dramatically different picture.

Since 1992, the total number of carpools on freeways with HOV lanes has increased
steadily, whereas on freeways without HOV lanes, the total number of carpools has
remained relatively constant or decreased. From 1992 to 2007, the data indicates an
increase of 79% in the total number of carpools on freeways with HOV lanes for the morning
peak 2-hour period. Significant increases in carpools were also observed in the afternoon
peak 2-hour period. Source

HOV Lanes are failing!
-- They are exceeding expectations in all regards. The comment that LA was chastised for the congestion in HOV lanes is addressed by adding more lanes for HOV drivers, not by reinventing the wheel so that we have the same problem with HOT lanes! This is only an issue, and only applies because California chose to let hybrid owners also use the carpool lanes in 2005. They were an incentive for people to purchase hybrids, and have been wildly successful. Does this mean that we phase out that benefit? Or does it mean that we add more HOV lanes to accommodate them? Either way, the HOT lanes do not solve the problem AND HOV commuters are STILL saving significant amounts of time.

Car-pool lanes were intended to give commuters who double up a smooth ride. The federal agency considers lanes to be congested -- and out of compliance -- when minimum speeds drop below 45 mph more than 10 percent of the time. Formerly, California did not have to live up to that standard. That changed when the state began letting solo drivers of gas-electric hybrids into the lanes in late 2005, McGowen said, in a phone interview. She said the Federal Transportation Act is invoked when hybrids are involved. Source

On average, HOV lane users save approximately one minute per mile, compared to mixedflow traffic during peak hours. Source

On average, each HOV facility in Los Angeles County carries 1350 vehicles per hour or 3200 people per hour, during peak hours. These volumes well exceed the minimum expected volume of 800 vehicles per hour or 1800 people per hour. Source

HOV Lanes cost a lot of money to build!
-- They are far more cost-efficent than mixed-flow lanes, since they serve more commuters in their allotted space, not to mention the commuters who have shorter commutes due to less traffic on the road and more carpooling.

On average, HOV facilities carry 33% of the entire freeway's people in just 20% of the freeway's space [1 out of 5 lanes (4 mixed-flow lane + 1 HOV lane)], while an adjacent single mixed-flow lane carries 17% of the entire freeway's people in the same 20% space. Source

HOT Lanes will keep people from cheating on carpool lanes!
-- This is not a significant problem being faced today, and there is no guarantee that the tolls will prevent cheating: you can see cheaters entering the HOT lanes in Corona/Riverside every day!

The average violation rate is 1.2%, which is substantially lower than the preferable rate of
below 10%, as specified in the HOV Guidelines for Planning, Design, and Operations. Source

Nowhere have you demonstrated how HOT lanes replacing the HOV lanes will:
1) Reduce traffic congestion for all commuters
2) Encourage carpooling*
3) Generate income*
4) Provide a better commute for drivers in the short term OR the long term
5) Affect how Los Angeles sees traffic, carpooling, mass transit, and freeways in a manner which is positive for congestion reduction or the environment
6) Provide a clear solution with a view toward future congestion, rather than a reaction to current congestion (it seems by the time we finish construction on one more lane, the traffic has already expanded to require 3 more lanes).

* In any of the plans put forward to date

[Damien Newton]

There was perhaps some sloppy writing here. I shouldn't have said they don't encourage carpooling, I should say they've stopped encouraging carpooling. At one point, in the years immediately after the lanes opened lots of people converted to carpools, but the time they created new carpoolers is over. The rate of people carpooling has been static for six years, and will remain so along the corridors which already have car pools.

So, what we have are carpool lanes that are filling up and the mode share of people willing to carpool along these corridors is remaining flat. You've advanced an third option here, and one that deserves consideration, which is to just expand the carpool lanes. I honestly think that is a great idea and would love to see a comparison of increasing HOV to changing current HOV to HOT.

I never said that HOT Lanes would make the commute better for everyone. What I have argued is that by variable pricing we can make it so that there is always a congestion free alternative available to every driver out there, be they car pooler or single passenger driver. For the a HOT Lanes plan to work, there has to either be a discount for carpoolers or the lanes have to be banned for single passenger vehicles. Metro is leaning towards going the discount route, and I can't say I blame them since part of the overall plan is to put HOT Lane proceeds into improving transit along these corridors.

[Kate]

If high fuel prices aren't getting people out of their cars, why will congestion pricing? Won't the HOT lanes just be full of people willing to pay a premium?

[Damien Newton]

How did I miss this meeting? I usually live at these downtown hearings. Oh, well...great catch.

I hope that the Council knows that it is a mix of enforcement and engineering that lead to behavior changes not the other way around. Without a well informed police community, you can engineer the heck out of roads and bikers will still be getting annoyance tickets and we'll have fewer cyclists on the road than the city wants.

My suggestion, don't over think this. Set a goal for what percent of the mode share the city wants cyclists to have. Chicago's is 5%. Seattle's is 12%, then figure out what the investment is to get there. If there really is a half cent tax for transportation going on the November ballot, we need to make sure some of that is dedicated for cyclists by speaking up NOW!

[Sammy]

The HOV lanes were already paid for. Metro needs to remember that they did not pay for it- the public did. Metro is not self sufficient, as should not pretend as though they built HOV and has some sort of ownership interest.

As for the interference of the feds (if you change HOV to HOT, you get $$$) I thought the republicans were all about less fed and more state and local. What happened here? Is D.C. trying to make socal look like the eastern seaboard where the toll roads are a major pain? (For those that have never lived on the east coast, you gotta pay tolls all over the place. An electronic toll pay would helps, tho)

[Brian Hitchcock]

Modern Highwaymen: Whatever the Traffic Will Bear

So now the federal DOT, after spending billions to build carpool lanes (to save fuel, help the environment and ease congestion) now plan to give $213 million more to California, partly to convert these carpool lanes to HOT (toll) lanes. In other words, to grant LA County a perpetual license to steal from the region’s commuters.

And what is the county going to do with this money? Well, for one thing, they plan to buy 260 new high-capacity buses (which Secretary Peters admits “few folks” will use) for 170.9 million (roughly $657,000 a pop); for another, “electronic tolling technology” (to steal from us more effectively) with sensors to monitor [traffic] and adjust fares (so if you dare to drive in a HOT lane, you’ll get burned — for whatever some computer decides the county can squeeze out of you!)

In 17th-century England there was a term for the scurrilous characters who practiced such a crime: highwaymen. They hid along roadways to ambush unwary travelers, demanding whatever extortion they could get before allowing the travelers to pass by. In fairy tales, such villains were called trolls.

Carpool lanes on our highways were built using everyone’s taxes (those on 10, 110, 210, 105, 405, and 605 used federal taxes from all states.) Local highway planners should be opening up these “underutilized” (failed) carpool lanes to ALL motorists, who already paid for them, not spending millions and imposing new fees to “allow” us to get home from work at a decent hour.

These modern-day trolls and highwaymen (Bonner, Villaraigosa, Schwarzenegger and Peters), hide under banners of euphemism (“infrastructure”, transit “upgrades”, “congestion reduction”); all the while plotting to pillage us hapless travelers.

No sensible Californian would put up with this triple taxation; it’s highway robbery. Motorists, I prithee: beseech thy assemblyman to protect us from such scoundrels!