NEW HAMPSHIRE HOV detoll abandoned

NEW HAMPSHIRE

HOV detoll abandoned

The New Hampshire Bureau of Turnpikes has ended the free ride for carpoolers at its Bedford plaza, and will not extend the practice. In an official statement the Bureau said it was discontinuing the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) Project which entitled vehicles carrying three or more adults to go by the plaza during peak hours without having to pay the toll. The normal toll is 75c cash, less with tokens. The HOV-3 toll-free pilot project lasted 2 years.

Albert Almasy, toll manager, says the project was abandoned because of poor results: “It just didn’t get significant numbers of new carpoolers.”

The state Dept of Transp which runs the turnpikes set 5% HOV as the goal but despite extensive publicity, including flyers handed out at toll booths, illuminated message signs and free media — and of course the toll set-aside — the project only got 2.7% of vehicles HOV.

The HOV toll-free period was 6-9am and 3-6pm weekdays when an average of 18,000 light vehicles pass the toll plaza daily. HOV3 toll-free was only 480 daily spread through those 6 hours, when the NHDOT had set 900 vehs/day as the minimum to make the scheme worthwhile.

The head of NHDOT Leon Kenison said the results were “disappointing” and showed “the driving habits of the public are difficult to alter.” Significant ride-sharing could not be achieved by extending the program, he concluded.

Al Almasy says the no-toll HOV period cost $93k of which the state bore a fifth and the FHWA 80%, under the Congestion Mitigation/Air Quality Improvement Program CMAQ, commonly known as see-mack.

The no-toll HOV project was conducted on one of the department’s busiest commuter routes, a 12 toll lane mainline plaza on the southern edge of the Manchester area on the F E Everett Tpk. Mornings it catches traffic from northern Boston MA and Nashua NH commuting north to Manchester and Concord and workers going from these communities south into the Boston area. And the reverse flows evenings. (Bostonians say NH is a “northern suburb of Boston.”)

Southern New Hampshire has a burst of bridge replacements and interchange improvements in process. The 74km turnpike system (see map above) run as a Bureau within the state DOT consists of:

(1) Everett Tpk located about equally north and south of the state’s major city Manchester, 38km in length with 10 ICs, the two sections being broken by untolled I-293 through the western portion of Manchester

(2) Spaulding Tpk, 16km going from Portsmouth and coastal I-95 northwest up the Salmon Falls River just inside the Maine border past Dover to Rochester

(3) the New Hampshire Tpk which is I-95 the major coastal highway, 20km from the MA line at Seabrook almost to Portsmouth and the Maine state line

The toll system collects about 230,000 tolls/day and raises $51m revenue. It uses tokens and coin machines and has begun investigations of electronic toll collection. Vollmer Associates has been appointed as a consultant. The NH tpks have many vehicles from nearby Maine (ME), and Massachusetts (MA) and some from New York running regularly on their system with e-toll tags. NH presents probably the country’s greatest problem of ETC interoperability because:

• MA has the Californian Texas Instruments/now Sirit/MFS backscatter technology (though it is asking for new propsoals and will probably scrap it for Mark IV)

• ME has a proprietary active system from AT/Comm

• NY has the mid-Atlantic standard active system from Mark IV

New Hampshire’s aggressive highway building program involves an upgrade to motorway standard of NH-101 linking Manchester directly to the coast and I-95 for the first time, together with a $250m beltway around the eastern part of Nashua-Hudson just north of the MA line. Wetlands issues were used by the USEPA to delay and block at least part of this project, but other parts are being built.

Massachusetts turnpike director James Kerasiotes told us late last year that US-3 from Boston up through Lowell to the NH line at Nashua badly needs upgrading, and that he may ask for private sector toll proposals. The north-south spinal I-93 Central Artery under construction on the eastern fringe of the central business district is supposedly a toll free facility but it is part of the Turnpike’s management responsibility under an unusual rearrangement. The project is hugely expensive ($10b) but has correspondingly huge toll potential (220k vehs/day) so the whole area is well worth attention for what tolls could do with creative interstate arrangements. (Al Almasy NH 603 465 3806 N70ARA@dot.state.nh.us, James Kerasiotes Mass Pike 617 973 7849)