VIDEO Uni Minn & Fed Hwys plug pricing

VIDEO

Uni Minn & Fed Hwys plug pricing

The Humphrey Inst at the Univ Minnesota with $s from the Fed Hwy Admin and MNDOT has released a video on road pricing called “Buying Time.” Subtitled “A New Strategy for Traffic Congestion Relief” it is a popular presentation of the case for HOT lanes. The video 13 minutes long contains a cutesy 5 year old named Jacob, constantly seen playing with Star Wars X-wing fighter-planes. When they get stuck in traffic in their minivan Jacob suggests to his gushy Dad that they “fly” over the backed-up traffic, upon which special effects appear and, as Jacob declares it “cool,” they whiz 20 feet over the top of the backed-up traffic, before a flash ends the dream, and the voice-over tells us there is no magic pill that will solve traffic problems but that “congestion relief tolling” and “variable tolls” can help...

It is all pretty low brow stuff as befits the visual medium – now there’s a snobbish remark from an old keyboarder– but it does what the box does best. It is worth enduring Jacob and his gooey father first up to see good film of the several variable pricing projects at work. Great footage of slow moving mixed lanes while cars fly by on the express lanes. And a bunch of those real people, who drive 91X, who get to talk about how the express lanes help them. They speak well. Solid credible testimony, which reinforces the point with viewers that road pricing is not just theory, that it is being implemented, successfully, and that it can improve the lives of real people, and that they appreciate it. The film is worth getting hold of and it is worth enduring the awful minivan ‘human interest’ for that alone.

The followon video, directed by TRnl

If it is local officials and traffic engineers you want to get to then something at a slightly higher intellectual level (like high school) and with more specifics might be worth having in addition. The star and voice over of this 50 minute documentary would be Mort Downey of FHWA. It would have Carl Williams talking about how he pushed it at Caltrans, Bob Poole of the Reason Foundation on what it took to get the idea taken seriously, maybe a flashback to the late Bill Vickrey making a wry provocative point at a Columbia seminar. We’d have Jerry Pfeffer or Alain Estiot Cofiroute taking about why the investors put money into 91-X and Ed Sullivan on how she’s doing. Then we’d have PBs Chuck ‘Mr-HOV’ Fuhs and Kenneth Orski bantering about the kinds of traffic conditions in which HOT lanes work, or don’t work, with lots transparencies and use of pointers to intersecting lines on graphs. Tom Higgins, Adeel Lari, Debbie Redman, John Berg, Kirin Bhatt and Karen Frick would be a kind of McLaughlin group on road pricing (with Kirin Bhatt being McLaughlin keeping order, demanding ratings 1 to 10.) Kim Kawada and Sarah Lawrence would talk about I-15, taking time off between takes to wave on motorists mistakenly stopping at their observation booth... Down in Houston Loyd Smith would stand out there in the middle of the Katy, his metro buses flashing by, inches from him and TTI’s Bill Stockton. And for a finale we’d be treated to the sub-tropical charms of Fort Myers Florida hosted by the glib bridge pricer Chris Swenson of Lee Co... Heck, I could be a film director, sitting in one of those chairs under the FL palm trees, lovely actresses all around... (For the first film contact Teresa Becker 612 626 0347 tbecker@hhh.umn.edu She’ll sock you $10.)