A RAPIER PHRASE:Lexus lanes

The “Lexus lanes” label has been used as a pejorative against toll express lanes to make the politically damaging charge that they are just for “the rich.” It’s a scurrilous misrepresentation but a darned clever one, because it is such a catchy phrase. The alliteration of the els.

Who, we wondered, was the evil genius who invented the Lexus Lanes label?

Not BMW’s marketing guys for sure, Don Paddleford pointed out. Fred Williams of the Fed Transit Admin told us: “Actually, Superman’s friend Lois Lane had an evil sister named Lexis Lane, an economist as I recall.”

We deserved that, having asked participants in Congestion Pricing List Serv for help. I’d suspected it might have been one of those famous quips of Debra Redman of SCAG and head of the REACH task force in Los Angeles. She in turn thought it might have been Peter Gordon USC or Bob Poole president of Reason, some of the earliest proponents. All three forcefully deny authorship. They are all, after all, in their different ways, HOT-lovers, can we say?

Julie Cidell of Univ Minnesota quickly used Altavista to find a Pacific Research Inst paper by Erin Schiller which said that when 91X first opened “critics such as state senator Tom Hayden contemptuously nicknamed them ‘Lexus lanes’ in reference to the fact that only the rich could afford to pay for them.”

Bob Poole recalls hearing the term used a little before the opening of 91X by both senators Tom Hayden, the radical from Vietnam days, and Bill Lockyer, a longtime demagogue against tolls. Lockyer’s press sec told us his boss was one of the earliest to use the term and may have given it currency but he thinks the senator didn’t originate it. He has a vague recollection that a visitor in a group mentioned it and the senator loved the phrase and picked it up. Hayden’s staff said much the same thing. He’d heard it elsewhere, maybe from Lockyer.

The term was much used in Minnesota in a heated political battle last year when HOT lanes were proposed on I-394 — the main drag out west of Minneapolis. Lee Munnich director of the Hubert Humphrey Inst’s congestion pricing studies says the term came to Minneapolis via Heidi Stamm, a “public involvement” specialist, as she terms it, in the Seattle area. (Professional advocate might capture her career better.)

Munnich remembers Stamm using the term “Lexus Lanes” during a presentation to the Humphrey Inst’s Citizens Jury on Congestion Pricing in St. Paul MN Jun 7, 1995.

Stamm was and still is an outspoken HOV-enthusiast and sees toll buy-ins as a threat to HOV lanes. Stamm refers to HOT-lanes supporters as “HOV sell-outs.”

Says Munnich: “As I recall from Heidi’s remarks, the term ‘Lexus Lane’ was introduced during a debate over HOV buy-ins in Seattle the year before. Heidi’s colorful and entertaining remarks were quite effective in turning the Citizens Jury against the HOV buy-in approach. This, of course, was before SR 91 and I-15, so there were no real applications of HOT.”

Heidi Stamm in turn says of the term Lexus lanes: “I did dream it up for my own presentations on the subject, and hadn’t heard it before, but there may be other people around who could also claim authorship. However, I am one of the ‘authors’, for sure!” She says she has been using the term for “about three years now.” That took us back to 1995.

Ken Buckeye of MNDOT dug out of his files a cartoon that had appeared in the SEATTLE TIMES back in 1994 (see above) That was when controversy was raging over a whole bunch of private sector toll proposals including United Infrastructure’s proposal for a staged network of HOT lanes throughout the greater Seattle area. The TIMES then-cartoonist Brian Basset has I-5 divided with all the ordinary people in buses crowded into a single bus and carpool lane and the rest of the roadway striped for a bunch of luxury car lanes including Accura, Mercedes, BMW, Infiniti, and — yes — a Lexus lane. Your tenacious mutt of a reporter tracked down the cartoonist Basset, no longer at the newspaper, and asked him if he had ever previously heard the term Lexus lane when he did the cartoon. His reply: “I can’t recall anyone suggesting Lexus lanes or hearing about it from some other source....so did I coin that phrase?? Cool.”

So there we were about to give the cartoonist the credit of authorship when we talked to Heidi Stamm again. She says she’s sure she was using the term “Lexus lanes” before the cartoon because she recalls being at a party attended by the cartoonist Brain Basset and talking with him about “Lexus lanes.” Seattle she says is a “very small town.” Stamm’s party talk may have inspired the Basset cartoon. Our Seattle HOV-lover claims authorship of “Lexus lanes” and on present evidence she deserves the credit. No, the blame. (Contact LISTSERV@TC.UMN.EDU to get on the Humphrey Inst congo pricing list, Heidi Stamm HSPAffairs@aol.com )