HOV ATTACK:Road rage against HOV

Earlier this summer under fighting headlines such as “Lanes of Pain,” “A Highway Travesty,” “No Useful Purpose,” and the best “The Feds need to be told diamond lanes aren’t forever,” the NEWARK STAR-LEDGER’s (STAR) columnist and feature writer John McLaughlin unleashed a week long offensive against high occupancy vehicle lanes (HOVL) in northern New Jersey. It was an impressive piece of campaign journalism. The product of a lot of persistent interviews, it was sharply written. It skilfully tapped a wellspring of motorist resentment against the carpool lanes.

McLaughlin’s most original contribution was to delve into the basis on which the US govt seeks to prevent states from responding to populist pressure and anti-HOVL road rage by simply abandoning HOV projects, and opening the lanes to solo drivers. It has been “an article of faith” McLaughlin says in the NJ state capital (and in other state capitals -TRnl) that HOV restrictions can’t be lifted without returning to the feds the money they provided to build them — $237m in the case of northern NJ’s HOVLs on I-80 and I-287.

The STAR series reveals that the Feds have almost nothing by way of a documented contractual commitment from the states to keep HOVLs HOV. The newspaper has “Bo” Sheldon Strickland, the father of HOV, now retired from the Federal Hwy Admin saying that everything is up to the elected officials to decide, and contrasts this with the assertion by the FHWA’s current regional boss, Dennis Merida that the NJ lanes are working well, and that the state would have to prove otherwise to the federal government, or recompense it. The thin reed on which Merida bases his claim of a legally binding obligation is the states agreement to “maintain” federally funded roadway, an agreement they make for all federal-aid roads, and which has been generally understood to mean keeping it in decent repair — though even there you’d be hard put to cite an example of the Feds ever taling action against a state because its roads were inadequately maintained.

The STAR’s campaigning McLaughlin suggested the state government call the Feds bluff, deregulate the HOV lanes, and let the US take NJ to court. The Feds could respond by simply withholding the money from new projects.

My guess is the courts would probably rule for NJ, or the politicians would negotiate a deal that gave NJ most of what it wanted. But steadily the national HOVL program would unravel, and it would then be up to the different states to decide which if any HOVL they wanted to keep.

Most interesting is how the various politicians reacted to the STAR campaign and the anti-HOVL road rage. NJ’s veteran senators Lautenberg and Torricelli, who only 4 or 5 years ago were among the most vociferous supporters of HOVL and played a major role in giving it financial priority, both rushed to insert language in a US appropriations bill that would grant the state the right to turn the I-287 HOVL over to single occupant vehicles, negating a specific provision they had insisted upon when the project was in design.

Gvnr HOVL flips

And the previous state governor Democrat Tom Kean who initiated most of the HOVLs said of them recently: “They are a total failure. They don’t work and they never will, and the pollution caused by cars crawling along along in two lanes while the other is empty doesn’t help anybody. I think there’s only one place in the country where they seem to work and that’s going to the Penatgon. And the reason it works is because there are so many people who work in that (huge) building who live in the same area and have the same hours. Naturally Washington assumes they will work everywhere.” (STAR 4/5/98)

Talk about somersaults!

The present Governor Christie Whitman and her transp sec John Haley both say HOVLs need reassessment, a major retreat from their previous strong endorsement. They are accelerating interim low-cost measures to help the HOVLs, and will, they say, decide their fate in a year’s time. Meanwhile there are studies being commissioned of options. In abeyance are plans to construct two much needed, but at $30m each, quite expensive, direct connector ramps linking the two HOVL systems (I-287N-I-80E and the reverse) and reducing the need for disruptive weaving movements at this interchange.

Melverne Cooke staffer to northern NJ Assemblyman Alex De Croce who heads an HOV task force told us there’s a lot of real anger out there among motorists, and that it is not just drummed up by the newspaper: “People are mad. We’ve heard from a lot of them. And it goes back a while. It isn’t just the newspaper.”

Motorists are mad at the waste of the underutilized HOVL — a common reaction to HOV lanes around the country. But what is unusual in New Jersey is how motorist anger and a crusading newspaper has put the state’s whole HOVL program in question. And produced serious talk among senior officials of decommissioning the lanes in defiance of the feds. State transp chief Haley has said that the decision as to whether to continue the HOVL should be the state’s alone — even though all the money came for the lanes came from the US govt as an HOV grant.

Anti-HOV movements or campaigns like New Jersey’s “sHOVe-it” have sprung up from time to time. Minneapolis had one. Orange County CA has one now. In the New York area HOVLs on the Long Island Exwy and Staten Is Exwy have been stopped by environmentalist/transit protests. In Suffolk County at the heart of the major New York State HOVL on the Long Island Exwy a bunch of county legislators are pushing for a “test opening” of the HOVLs to general traffic to see what effect it has on traffic flow and occupancy. Significantly the Long Island Regional Planning Board has endorsed the test opening of HOVL to general traffic. The NY State DOT is resisting arguing that once they are opened up there’s little likelihood they will ever be returned to special status — hardly a show of faith in the value of HOVL! Freeing HOVLs to general traffic has so far been thwarted many other places early on with the argument that the Feds would have to be repaid, and so it isn’t financially feasible. If the state of NJ were to show that ain’t so, then much of the HOVL program could unravel around the country.

Many worse HOVLs than NJ’s

A quick review of HOVL performance in several other areas shows the NJ HOVLs are pretty middling in performance, perhaps a bit below average but not nearly as pathetic as some of the real dogs of HOVLs such as VA-44 in Norfolk VA, CA-118 and a couple of others in the San Fernando Valley CA (west of LA,) 35W in Minnesota or I-580 in Richmond CA in the Bay area. (See table p3)

NJ/I-80 the radial mwy has 2 concurrent flow HOVL for 17km (10.3mi) that goes in toward the major employment centers of Newark, the Hudson River waterfront and Manhattan. I-287 is a north-south route that connects new fringe area employment and commercial complexes and intersects I-80 not far from the inner or eastern end of its HOVL. It has 33km (20.5mi) of HOVL south of the I-80 IC in Parsipanny.

The I-80/HOVL has been open 4 years, the I-287/HOVL just this year. The new one has performed dismally, everyone agrees, its peak usage being about 800 veh/hr, but long sections get fewer than 300 to 400. I-80 is more respectable. A Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) “I-80 HOV Lane Evaluation Study” published last year was generally upbeat about the project and said it was a “modest success.” It based this assessment on increases in average vehicle occupancy for the highway as a whole measured in before and after studies — from 1.196 to 1.275, a 6.6% increase (1993 to 96). This is in fact a modest increase. And the latest numbers for this year show a slippage to 1.260, for just a 5.4% rise over pre-HOVL.

The PB report admits that without violators the HOV volumes are “not statistically different” (p16) from the HOV-eligibles from before the HOV lane was installed, suggesting no conclusion can validly be drawn about it having increased car-pooling. That doesn’t stop the unnamed author of the study from claiming in a conclusion that the project goal of moving more people per vehicle “appears to have been achieved.” Why apply a test of statistical significance and then disregard it when drawing a conclusion? This is the kind of statistical monkey business you’ve come to expect from the USEPA commenting on secondary tobacco smoke!

Citing Fuhs

Usage of the lane has been hitting 1,000 veh/hr in the peak, slightly more often than before but most of the increase in usage over the 4 years appears to have been violators. PB reported violations at under 10% (for 1996) but they have since (1998 data) more than doubled to 18%.

Some of the I-80 numbers are measured against what it says is “the accepted range of 400 to 800 vehicles per hour for HOV viability.” (p16) The I-80 report gives as a reference for these numbers a manual on High Occupancy Vehicle Facilities by Charles (Chuck) Fuhs, another PB official. Good reference because Chuck is indeed a recognized national expert on HOV facilities. But the PB report on NJ/I-80/HOV is an inexcusable misrepresentation of what Fuhs’ manual (and common highway engineering knowledge) says. The 400 to 800 vehicles/hour in Fuhs’ manual is under the heading “Minimum Throughput” and reads “For suburban-oriented lanes, initial usage during the peak hour should be a minimum of 400 to 800 vehicles, depending on what is locally acceptable to achieve an adequate perception of use” (p28 of “High-Occupancy Vehicle Facilities: Current Planning, Operation and Design Practices.” p104 has a similar statement.)

What Fuhs is saying that you need a minimum of 400 to 800 immediately for PR/political reasons, so the other drivers don’t get too furious with an “empty” lane. He is not talking about “viability” in the normal sense of what is a longer term measure of effective utilization. Fuhs manual emphasizes HOV time savings compared to the unrestricted lanes as one primary measure of viability and says that HOV must “provide an average travel time savings of at least one minute per mile or a minimum of about five to eight minutes per trip” (p101.) The I-80 report shows an array of time savings and huge variability, but says the average is 3 minutes or 20sec/mi. Fuhs told us in a telephone interview that he thinks the 5min time savings is the more important attribute in order to get sufficient people to form carpools, or to pay a toll, and he does not place as much store by the importance of the 1min/mile as he did when he wrote his HOV manual.

Fuhs sees 1,500 veh/lane/hr as about the safe ceiling to aim for in single lane operations, and most traffic operations people would say that traffic 1,000 to 1500 veh/hr is a viable range for HOVL, not the 400 to 800 range mentioned in the I-80 report by PB — which overall smacks more of crude PR spin than professional engineering advice. (It has some infuriating inaccuracies such as the statement that the I-80 HOVL is “the precursor of a much larger HOV network for New Jersey.” (p7)

I wanted to get details of this supposed network, but the North Jersey Transp Planning Authority and NJDOT both say that there has never been any such network planned.)

Traffic engineers at NJDOT agree I-80 overall is not performing well in this stretch. Traffic flow regularly breaks down in the 2x3 mixed lanes in the range 1,600 to 1,800 vehicles/lane/hour, apparently because of ill-designed interchange ramps and excessive weaving. The HOVL is without any buffer space at all and allows access and egress all along its length. Well designed highways in California and in Minneapolis regularly carry half as much traffic again as NJ/I-80 (2400 to 2600 vehs/lane/hr) without breaking down.

The NJ/I-80 fix is a shoo-in

Actually there’s an easy and not too expensive fix for the I-80 mess which PB, if it had been doing a professional engineering job, could have mentioned as an option — convert the I-80/HOVL to a contraflow arrangement. I-80 is a classic tidal flow commuter road, eastbound in the am, westbound pm. The Whitman administration can get the angry SOVs off its back by abandoning the fixed 3/1/1/3 configuration and going to a 4/1/3 am, 3/1/4 pm lane arrangement by using moveable barriers to protect a contraflow HOVL in the offpeak roadway. Giving the peak flow of SOVs 4-lanes instead of the present 3-lanes would go a long way to reducing the present overloading of the highway. And controlling access and egress would end a lot of the excessive weaving all along the length of the concurrent-flow HOVL that is so disruptive to I-80 operations presently.

Contraflow protected by a moveable barrier works like a charm on 10km (6mi) of the Southeastern Expressway (I-93) in Boston between Dorchester and Braintree MA. They call it a “Zipper Lane” there. A similar one is at work each day on 14km (8.6mi) of the Thornton Fwy (I-30) in Dallas and a third has just opened on 15km (9.5mi) of Honolulu’s busiest mwy the H-1 near Pearl Harbor. The equipment with a specialized straddle truck to move the barrier has long been in use on a bunch of bridges and for protecting and reconfiguring construction zones. (see TRnl#25 Mar 98 p5)

Officials in NJ confirmed that Barrier Systems Inc, which has installed the Boston, Dallas and Honolulu contraflow HOVLs, is working on a proposal for NJDOT. But if I-80 is rather simply fixed there remains a major political problem for HOV. With some validity it is said that two is hardly “high occupancy” in a vehicle which can seat 4 or 5. Most of the time it isn’t even a carpool in the sense of unrelated people making arrangements to share who otherwise would drive separately. Usually it’s husband and wife, father and son, mother and child. And if the two would have shared the car anyway, all an HOVL is doing is rearranging the traffic horizontally on the roadway.

HOVL advocates often cite the greater person-carrying capacity of the HOVL relative to the mixed traffic lanes which is a dishonest measure if all that has been done is to concentrate HOVs, which would have travelled the roadway anyway, into their own lane — at the expense of greater weaving movements. The valid question is how far the HOVL has gone to encourage new carpools to be formed.

Pricing odyssey

Traffic operations managers with HOVLs face Odysseus’s challenge of avoiding the Scylla of ‘empty lane syndrome’ and the Charybdis of overload. That’s why there is so much interest in the toll buy-in operations on I-15 San Diego and the Katy Fwy in Houston.

HOVLs are an extraordinarily mixed bag in the traffic they attract. Some bump around in the 1,000 to 1500 viable range, having enough spare space to offer drivers the extra speed of travel that is their selling point, without having so much empty space that they enrage the SOVs. But many suffer a severe shortage of carpooler patrons. And at the other extreme, a few are threatened by overload, in which case they will cease to function.

As the Inst of Transp Engineers task force on HOT lanes pointed out, toll buy-in is especially useful to traffic managers needing to navigate safely between the equally hazardous extremes of drought and flood. By manipulating a toll rate dynamically they can exercise some control over the traffic flow in such ‘managed’ express lanes.

In California and Texas there is a major push to develop wider managed express facilities. On CA-57 presently 4/1/1/4 a major north-south freeway (240k veh/day,) with the single concurrent flow HOV each direction, a new HOT lanes study will look at the optimum configuration with the possibility of going to a 2x2-lane HOT facility like 91-Express nearby, or a 3-lanes with moveable barrier, or 2 HOV and 2 toll lanes.

By providing a 2nd lane per direction the per-lane capacity is bumped up from perhaps 1500 to 2250/hr so a 2x2 express facility has 4500 spaces to sell each direction, three times a 2x1, the greater throughput being because fast drivers can get around the ‘slugs’ who periodically limit the traffic flow in single lane facilities.

CA-14, the Antelope Valley Fwy corridor north of Los Angeles is to be studied for a 2x2 lane toll express or HOT lane facility in addition to the existing 2x2 mixed lanes. CA-91 in Riverside county from the eastern end of 91-X to I-15 plus the Riverside portion of the new CA-71 fwy that makes a tee-junction into CA-91 are the subject of two studies that are looking at air quality implications, and revenue possibilities, for managed lanes. (Incidentally the new chief of the Riverside County Transp Commission is Eric Haley, Jack Reagan having left for Fresno in central CA)

It’s clearly more difficult to make money out of HOV2/toll because with HOV2 the lanes carry quite a lot of free riders. So most HOT proposals require 3 for a free ride (HOV3). The US-101/Sonoma County toll express lanes proposal became self-financing at HOV3. (see TRnl#28 Jun 98, p1) Requiring 3-passengers for the free ride leaves a decent amount of space in the lane to collect tolls on.

The possibility of instituting toll buy-in arrangements (converting HOVL to HOT lanes) seems likely to arise on VA/I-66 inside the Beltway. HOV adminstrators face the prospect of overload at HOV2 when the nation’s only HOV-only highway gets to be fed by (and to feed) two streams of HOV. To the I-66 outside the Beltway will soon be added a Dulles Toll Road HOVL merging into it at West Falls Church VA.

If they simply raise the vehicle occupancy requirement to HOV3 from HOV2 the traffic managers face the certainty of a NJ-style outcry, and demands for the abandonment of HOV. Their HOVL traffic will plummet down from about 2,000 veh/lane/hr to about 500 to 700. At the same time with 1300 to 1500 HOV2s dumped onto other routes or forced onto the time shoulders of the peak there will be major disruption of traffic flows, and big protests from motorists. Houston, Los Angeles and the Bay area all have HOVLs that are getting close to overload like this at HOV2.

Pricing essential

The only technique that allows traffic flows to be fine tuned is dynamic pricing, and in the HOV program lies an enormous opportunity for advocates of road pricing. There are now some 1500km (900mi) of centerline urban mwys in the US with HOV, and slightly more than that under construction, in design or planned. It represents 3,100 lane-km (1890 lane-mi) in operation and another 3,160 lane-km (1,930 lane-mi) proposed. (see table above) These HOVLs are strategically located, for the most part, on the most stressed highways in the nation, the very places most in need of pricing and other creative measures. And they provide a logical transition ground to pricing.

Of course acceptance is far from assured because of confused thinking.

Reverting to NJ, the state’s transp sec John Haley has embraced a lot of the trendy environmentalist defeatism about traffic congestion. He told the STAR paper that there was such great latent demand on I-80 that traffic growth would simply overwhelm the extra lane if it were opened to general traffic. That is a kind of anti-highways dogma which asserts an unlimited latent demand against any proposed extra capacity. Without detailed study and good modeling — and perhaps a six month test — noone knows. But even if, as the defeatists about roads say, the congestion level were not to be relieved because of latent demand filling the extra capacity completely, the fourth lane made possible by the obvious contraflow solution would be carrying a third more motorists on journeys that they voluntarily choose to make, catering to the demonstrated needs of a third more motorists.

And to the HOT lanes suggestion Haley said: “I’m skeptical. I think people would feel that they have already paid for this road once. Why should they pay again?”

The reason they should pay again is that what they have already paid in gas taxes has only bought what highway we have. And what highway we have, the motorists say quite vocally, is not good enough. The people of NJ want something better, and perhaps some of them are prepared to pay for it.

Our manifesto

The people on congested highways like NJ/I-80 need a choice:

(1) To pay more for better highway service in managed toll express lanes when a smooth and rapid trip is so important to them that they are prepared to pay the extra it takes to finance and manage, or

(2) To pay no more than they are paying now and take their chances in free unmanaged lanes when they prefer the economy road service.

Only a mix of HOT and free lanes can provide that choice.

Highway service doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all construct. Like UPS or Fed-Ex it needs to offer choices between overnight delivery at a premium price and regular slower service at a lower price.

To those super-egalitarians who say we can’t have rich guys buying their way past congestion, the answer is: Why the heck not? In every other sphere of our life money buys better service, both for the rich and for others too, when it is especially important to them. Do we ban overnight delivery by Fed-Ex because it might give the rich guy a break on people using the regular mail? Are highways to remain an unresponsive bureaucratic backwater because socialist and egalitarian notions — deservedly rejected elsewhere in the economy — are allowed to exercise a veto over highway service. If Republicans, supposedly dedicated to individual choice and the market, fail to seize this opportunity it will be a sad demonstration of their intellectual bankruptcy and their political cowardice.

(Contacts: Jim Pivovar I-80/287 studies NJDOT 609 530 2873, Debra Redman, SCAG on the LA studies 213 236 1928, Eric Haley Riverside Co Transp Comm on 91/71 studies 909 787 7141, Ellen Burton CA-57 study OCTA 714 560 6282, Chuck Fuhs PB 713 785 1139)