LEE CO FL:Differential prices demonstrated on 2 bridges

One of the country’s most successful variable pricing projects has been in the relatively small (400k pop) metro area of Fort Myers/ Cape Coral in Lee county in southwestern Florida. The project has been so successful in easing congestion, and gaining public support, that local officials are enthusiastic about extending the principle to I-75, the spinal north-south highway through the region and its only motorway standard road.

A pair of 2x2-lane toll bridges 5km (3mi) apart in Lee County FL that run about 65k veh/day have had differential prices – peak hours versus shoulder times – since Aug 98 and the results are in (see barcharts p19). Higher peak prices have a marked effect in moving trips to the shoulders of the peak period.

And people like it. An opinion survey showed 70% with a favorable opinion versus 20% unfavorable. Local elected officials have been converted into pricing believers also with one county commissioner John Albion going on the talking circuit in favor of pricing.

Much of the success is probably due to the guy in charge of the project, Chris Swenson, an engineer with a bubbling, enthusiastic personality, a silver tongue and an obvious delight in innovation. He used to be on the county and FHWA payroll but with federal money for the project running out, he’s shifted to working on contract.

Swenson did such a job – or got lucky – and the shoulder discounts are not costing anything like the projected amount. Of $6.4m budgeted in a toll reserve fund to pay for the discounting of tolls, only $1.2m has been spent. The county is now negotiating with the feds to put the saved $5.2m in a revolving fund to support other road pricing projects in the region.

The most significant of these is a planning study of pricing alternatives for I-75. The existing highway at 2x2-lanes with a mix of area and through traffic is heading for congestion and a major investment study of alternative upgrades will start shortly at the Lee County MPO. The highway is 50km (30mi) in length within the county, and has nine interchanges. Another IC is planned. One possibility is to go to a 2/2/2/2 configuration with the middle lanes priced or HOT, and the outer free. They might also study having all the lane priced in peak hours?

Lee Co commissioner John Albion told us he thinks the most likely form of pricing could be queue-jump lanes on the I-75 ramps. Apparently there is talk of ramp metering to manage traffic. Ramp bypass lanes would allow motorists in a hurry to pay via electronic toll transponder to drive a second toll-express lane on the ramp and get ahead of lines backed up at a ramp meter.

Albion says another project that is a candidate for variable pricing is the Sanibel Island Bridge. There is agreement the bridge needs to be twinned for hurricane evacuation, but a desire to manage traffic volumes on the island itself. Pricing could play a role.

The county is proposing that the money saved on the Midpoint/Cape Coral bridges pricing project be used first for the I-75 pricing studies, then later if that is repaid, on other projects such as Sanibel Is.

Albion says the Cape Coral/Midpoint pricing has been a “great success, definitely” and there is support for doing more.

Swenson says people love the results of the pricing on the bridges: “Obviously the people who get the discount like it. But I’ve even had the people who continue to travel in the peak and pay the higher toll say: ‘Don’t take the toll down. It will just bring back congestion.’”

Electronic tolling called LeeWay (and using Amtech tags) started in Nov 97 on 31 toll lanes on the Cape Coral and the Midpoint toll bridges which span the wide tidal Caloosahatchee River between the twin cities of Fort Myers and Cape Coral. There was 8 months of flat rate electronic tolling to provides solid base data for comparisons. They got the ‘before’ differential pricing data, then moved to collect ‘after’ data. $400k of assessment studies are being conducted by Mark Burris of the Center for Urban Transp Research (CUTR) at Univ South Florida.

Swenson says the thinking behind the pricing project was that over 20 years the area would need about $1.5b of roadway expansion to maintain present levels of service. If pricing and other measures could get peak hour traffic down by 10% $200m less new roadway spending would be needed. Pricing on the bridges was estimated to contribute perhaps 3 to 4% to reduction in peak demands on the system. But one aim of the shoulder discount project was to get some live data on how motorists react to different toll rates to gain some insights into what can be expected of other pricing schemes.

THE PROJECT: After Aug 98 toll bridge patrons with LeeWay transponders started to get a 50% toll discount for weekday travel in the shoulder periods before and after the peak hours. Middle of the day, night-time and weekend tolls remained unchanged.

As the graph shows there was a substantial increase in shoulder travel and reduction in peak hour travel on the Midpoint Bridge. In the half hour before the AM peak traffic was up 19%, while in the peakit was down between 3% and 14%. In the period after the AM peak traffic was up 3% to 7%. At the Cape Coral Bridge, the time-shifting effect was still significant, but not quite so strong, in part because it is less used by commuters than the Midpoint, more by retired people and vacationers who are less motivated to have transponders. There is significant time-shifting in the PM peaks but the shift is somewhat less than in the mornings. One lesson: if you really need to move trips to the shoulders you’ll probably need a great price differential in the PM peak than in the AM peak.

Motorists paying cash and not eligible for the discount in Lee county behaved rationally also. They increased their use of the peak, taking advantage of the lessened congestion and reduced their use of shoulder times. But the change was quite small. It only slightly offset the overall de-peaking.

These were occasional users such as visitors, less concerned than the regulars, probably, about their toll bills, and less likely to plan the timing of their trips. So the change of the occasional users was small and certainly did not offset the peak flight of the regulars.

The Lee County test of variable tolls was, by all accounts, exceptionally well planned and implemented with excellent marketing and presentations. A shame these skills aren’t used where they are really needed such as up here on the Washington Beltway and the Wilson bridge. They really don’t know what congestion is down there! To which they respond that they want to test and demonstrate pricing, and get it locally entrenched, so they’ll never have to know. (Contact John Albion, Lee Co 941 335 2396, Chris Swenson 941 573 7960 crspe@

worldnet.att.net, Mark Burris CUTR Burris@cutr.eng.usf.edu)