BAY AREA:Truck buy-in & 2 toll-X studies

MTA is sponsoring the country’s first study of medium and smaller truck buy-in to HOV lanes. The $120k study is to investigate a major east Bay truck route on I-880 in Alameda Co. The 42km (26mi) eventual route would extend from the Oakland airport south as far as CA-237 in Santa Clara co at the south end of the Bay. CA-237 goes direct to Sunnyvale and Mountain View where companies like Intel, Sun and Apple have major facilities and is home to thousands of small start-ups. Oakland is a major freight handling center for the region.

An MTC briefing paper on what it calls “I-880 Commercial Vehicle Buy-In” says: “The Concept would be to permit small package delivery trucks to ‘subscribe’ to use of the I-880 carpool lanes. While I-880 is a heavy truck corridor, there are a large number of smaller UPS/FedEx type tucks traveling to and from Oakland airport and other area destinations.”

The study would examine:

• the level of interest and willingness to pay of package freight companies

• types of vehicles that might be allowed to buy-in

• time savings and value of time of users

• potential revenues and use of revenues

• enforcement and operational issues

Steve Heminger director of planning at the MTC says 18-wheelers will not well mix with carpool vehicles but agile cube vans used in pickup and delivery of packages and small cargo could well be part of such managed lanes in the future.

A second study proposed to get funding ($175k) is of the Sunol Grade section of I-680 a major commuter route connecting the residential suburbs like Walnut Creek, Danville and San Ramon in Contra Costa and Livermore, Dublin and Pleasanton in Alameda to Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley jobs in the South Bay area.

The MTC already has a major investment study of the I-680 corridor which has gone quickly from free-flowing to heavily congested in just the past two to three years. The MIS however does not provide the money for full evaluation of a variably priced lane. Two separate toll buy-in proposals have been made for I-680: (1) concurrent-flow HOV-3 free with other cars able to buy-in (2) adding an HOV southbound and using this plus the use of a movable barrier to borrow the inner northbound lane to run two HOT lanes southbound in the morning rush.

The study would address the practicability of the schemes, recommend entry and exit points, crossovers, separation of traffic, estimate revenues and costs and project the impacts on traffic. MTC would support the two studies with its travel demand forecast model.

Novato Narrows

In the northwest Bay area another study is already under way of a reversible lanes arrangement for US-101 in a 12km (7mi) section known as the Novato Narrows from the Petaluma River bridge to CA-37. This is presently a 4-lane undivided signalized arterial, about one-third inside Sonoma county and two-thirds in Marin County. There is a 1950s style 2x2-lane motorway standard highway on either end.

MTC recently gave this work ($36k) to the San Francisco office of Parsons Brinckerhoff as a southward extension of work it did in 1997 on US-101 in Sonoma County between Petaluma and Santa Rosa (see TRnl#28 Jun 98 p1). Both counties failed late last year in ballots to get voter approval for sales tax increases to support transp. Environmentalist and anti-tax groups campaigned against the proposed tax increases saying that toll buy-in would enable projects like US-101 to be self-financing.

Heminger of the MTC says the Novato Narrows section of US-101 is most unlikely to be self-financing, since it involves some expensive bridgework, and environmental mitigation. But tolls on a reversible express lane might go a substantial way to helping fund the improvement. Previously there was a scheme to build concurrent HOV lanes in this section. The study will compare toll-X lanes with HOV lanes and look at a 2-lane reversible HOT lanes or toll-X alternate.

The retirement last year of a loudmouthed anti-toll state senator William Lockyer has apparently enabled local transp planners to move ahead with these projects, though of course they are far too discreet to say it like that. (Contact S. Heminger 510 464 7810, Dennis Fay Alameda Co Transp Management District 510 836 2560x12, James Bourgart PB 415 243 4750)

Minneapolis-St Paul MN

Kenneth Buckeye of the Minnesota DOT says he is interested in ideas on light commercial vehicle buy-in to HOV lanes. He’s considering studies for I-394, where a fullblown HOT lane was called off by a previous governor just weeks away from start-up. (Contact tel 612 296 1606)