HOVLs:Their two conflicted masters

High Occupancy Vehicle Lanes (HOVLs) may all look and seem much the same, but actually they come from competing shops. It seems that out there where the rubber hits the pavement there are HOVL/FHWA and HOVL/FTA .

On a HOVL/FHWA, which is a carpool lane funded by the Federal Highway Admin the US government welcomes experimentation with the free market. Not only welcomes it but will give you a “slot” under the Value Pricing program and will help fund your introduction of single occupant vehicles (SOVs) for a fee. And the more innovative you are in pricing the SOVs the more likely you are to earn federal permits and fed-$s.

But if you own a HOVL/FTA, an apparently identical carpool lane, then the US government in the form of the Federal Transit Admin is liable to say “We financed that thing for transit and while carpools might be a kind of transit, no way is a SOV transit, so Faahhhh Geddit” to any proposal for toll buy-in of SOVs.

This seems to be what is happening to Houston’s Metro. That agency was unfortunate enough to fund its HOVLs under the FTA, which feels it cannot allow anything it funds to have those dread SOVs on its turf.

Houston Metro has been conducting a toll buy-in program called QuickRide for HOV2s (see TRnl#27 May 98 p12) in its 21km single lane reversible on the Katy I-10 out west of the downtown. With HOV2-free the lane got clogged, but when the occupancy requirement for the HOVL was raised in 1988 to HOV3 during 75mins of the peak the facility ran about half empty. It currently runs about 700 HOV3 vehs/hr.

QuickRide

Houston Metro has been trying to get more utilization out of the lane by letting some of the HOV2s back in for a toll — $2.00/trip. But this QuickRide program under which HOV2s register, establish an account and use a transponder to pay the toll has had rather few takers — about 150/day or a fifth of what it could easily accomodate without clogging the lane. Metro could try for more HOV2s at a lower toll, but to increase the number sufficiently might need an absurdly low toll, hardly worth collecting. So they have been wondering about opening the lane to SOVs for a toll.

The Katy lane is a HOVL/FTA so project manager Loyd Smith has a formal letter in with the FTA asking them to clarify whether the agency objects to variable pricing for SOVs on “their” HOVL. Smith isn’t sure if his board wants to dabble in SOVs but so far he has been unable to get a clear ruling from the US govt on whether it is even an option he can suggest, because of the FTA/FHWA split over HOVL policy.

Which reminds us of Pittsburgh, which has a couple of splendid busways — roads for the exclusive use of buses. Not just for the use of buses but for the exclusive use of PA Transit buses, it seems.

We were naive enough to ask the official spokesman at PAT whether they’d considered opening the busway up to vans and carpools or cars for a fee. We heard her drawing in her breath as if we’d uttered an awful obscenity, and she responded icily: “They are OURS. They are for OUR buses.” Then she added as if the question came from the mouth of a total moron: “We haven’t heard any suggestion like that.”

Which is why Pittsburgh’s busways are quite a hazard for hobos. The PAT buses are so far and few between that a guy could easily watch the road awhile, say for 15mins, see nothing rolling, think it was a closed off and good for a snooze on a sunny day, and fall into a deep sleep on the pavement before a PAT bus finally came tooling along. (Contact Loyd Smith, Houston Metro 713 739 3870)

Comment: In Australia and New Zealand they have introduced the revolutionary idea that publicly financed infrastructure belongs to the public, rather than to protected state fiefdoms like PA Transit, and require that it be regularly put out to bid to see who can use it most productively. Or they have to sell it off to the highest bidder.