HOT disagreement: State DOT vs Thruway on Cross Westchester

Correspondence released with the Final Design Report/EIS on reconstruction of the Cross Westchester Expressway (CWE) shows sharp disagreement between the New York State Thruway and the State Dept of Transp (NYSDOT) over HOV buy-in. The CWE, 32km north of Central Park links the Tappan Zee bridge over the Hudson River and the New York State Thruway at its western end with I-95, the major coastal highway that roughly follows the NY-CT shore of Long Island Sound. But most of all, the CWE is the main transport artery of Westchester County, population 870,000, home of IBM, Pepsi and many other of the world’s best-known companies, and some of the prettiest suburban development anywhere. Heavily treed hills and bubbling streams run north-south and there are six arterials (and 3 rail lines) running south into New York City, several of them fetchingly attractive cars-only parkways designed in the 1920s. The Cross Westchester is a bold 1950s 6-lane motorway that ties all these together creating a new east-west axis which in turn was instrumental in making the city of White Plains into a major regional center. 16km long the CWE is a snakily curving highway with 15 (some incomplete) interchanges and is used for many short trips as well as longer distance travel. It carries up to 100k veh/day, 95% cars, rather directional east am, west pm, and suffers major congestion, due to the weaving and merge problems of the interchanges and to plain overload in peak hours. With the completion of I-287 in New Jersey in the late 80s, the CWE became a more important part of the whole regional mwy grid.

A 12-year planning process has produced a design for virtual complete reconstruction of the aging bridges and pavement of the existing highway to a 3/1/3 configuration the central lane being a reversible barriered HOV, Houston-style, with its own central ramps at 5 interchanges, together with some major parallel connector-distributor roadways to take some of the short trips off the mainline and alleviate weave problems.

Responsibility for the design and capital works lies with the NY state DOT but since 1991 maintenance and operation on the CWE has been done by the State Thruway Authority, though it does not levy any tolls on the facility — a truly bizarre arrangement of confused responsibilities that only New York govt could have devised! The report together with the Vol 2 point-counterpoint arguments is an eloquent statement of the HOV case at its most passionate. A simple 4/4 road wanted by the Thruway Authority and most citizens who favored enlargement, would have been $267m, 3/4th the cost of the 7-laner, and provided greater immediate relief to congestion. But the State DOT says it must have HOV and it makes the case that any attempt to run 2 central concurrent-flow HOV lanes simply striped off, LA-style within a 4/4 roadway would create unmanageable enforcement and weaving problems that would aggravate congestion and accidents. The Thruway then urged SOV buy-in as part of the 3-roadway arrangement, though a single lane is not likely to offer very much capacity for buy-in — a Shirley-style reversible 38’ (4’ 12’ 12’ 10’) would offer over double the capacity with only 46% more pavement, given the CWE’s 26’ design with regulation 4’ and 10’ shoulders on either side of the 12’ travel lane. But capacity is not the name of this game.

In a fascinating exchange between the two state authorities the DOT adamantly rejects the Thruway’s buy-in proposal: “The HOV alternative (3/1/3) does not include a ‘buy-in’ component which would allow SOVs into the HOV lane because that is contrary to the objective to move more people in fewer cars.” (pVI-54) That sentence is a neat encapsulation of what Kenneth Orski has called “HOV ideology” which seems to resist the mere presence of SOVs in an HOV facility as somehow sullying the purity of this morally superior roadway, this holy ground of right ridersharers — the annointed blacktop.

Pragmatic HOV vs Hezbollah HOV: The HOV crusade was launched on the slogan “Move people not cars,” which while somewhat cavalier in its treatment of the wishes of those people who do not care to share (SOV-drivers are people too), at least has the pragmatic and measureable goal of maximizing passenger throughput. This pragmatic version of HOV objectives seems logically compatible with buy-in. The HOT (High Occupant vehicle free/others Tolled) or idea is that where there is spare capacity on the HOV lane you improve overall carrying capacity and balance traffic better between the HO lanes and the unrestricted lanes by allowing a controlled number of SOVs to ‘buy-in’ to the HO lanes. By managing the number of buy-ins to below the number which would slow HO lane speeds you carry more people in the HO (now HOT) lane, so you serve the cause of carrying-more-people with HOT. The buy-in allows you to serve the pragmatic-HOV cause better than pure HOV.

But there has always been a fundamentalist strain to the HOV movement. For some HOV true-believers the objective is not so much moving people but “move-more-people-in-fewer-cars.” Influential was the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s “Re-Thinking HOV” report which argued (1) against any new pavement being laid for HOV on the grounds that it frees space up on the unrestricted lanes. Under no circumstances must public policy help selfish SOVs. (2) All new HOV lanes should be created by conversion of existing unrestricted lanes into HOV (3) the only real HOV is a busway and only limited numbers of filled vans and autos should be tolerated and on a temporary basis (4) an empty HOV is fine because it increases the advantage granted the morally worthy ridesharers over the selfish-SOVs (5) any objection by SOVs stuck in the stop&go to the empty HOV lane is “greed” and “envy” on the part of the unworthy and should be denounced or disregarded.

This doctrine is truly Hezbollah-HOV! (‘Hezhov’?) For this scord the fewer unrestricted lanes the better, which becomes a formula for progressively getting rid of automobile highways in favor of bus/vanways.

And NYSDOT seems to have got an extreme version of the HOV religion at the CWE. It says that for the unrestricted lanes of the future CWE “a target or acceptable level of service (LOS) is not a goal or objective of this project.” (VI-73) Its modelling shows that to accomodate unrestricted traffic at LOS C or D the CWE would need to be “at least” 10-lanes, so it is planning its 7-laner to provide LOS E (mostly) in the 6 unrestricted lanes and is using this to force people to pool. (III-45) It estimates a HOV-lane travel time of 19.6mins to 31.7mins in the SOV lanes. NYSDOT writes that “the HOV Alternatives drivers (NYSDOTspeak for miserable selfish SOVs) in the general use lanes will experience congestion similar to today’s levels.” (viii) With LOS for SOVs ditched, the objective becomes “increasing multi-occupant vehicle usage...” In response to the critics’ refrain that an HOV2 “date is not a carpool” NYSDOT says occupancy requirements will be “increased until hopefully (the center HOV lane) will carry only buses and vans that are filled with people.” (VI-359)

But interestingly the Cross Westchester hearings processes saw the greens rallying against even the Hezbollah-HOV proposal of the NYSDOT. Environmentalists are a slippery bunch. They were the original advocates of HOV. They urged it on a skeptical highway engineering community which after years of being beaten around eventually saw the HOV light and began implementing it. Not a few highwaymen have actually got the fundamentalist-HOV religion and now resist HOT as a ethical backslide, a subversives way of undoing HOV.

Meanwhile the enviros have moved on, decided HOV was a bad idea after all, and now assail HOV proposals, an assault that reached passionate proportions over the Cross Westchester. Their constant refrain (see Vol 2 of Final Design Report) is that the HOV lane increases highway capacity, which encourages sprawl and other bad stuff. Now one guy’s sprawl is another guy’s escape from overcrowding, but the Deep Greens know that We Must Have Denser Development. No tool of public policy must be left unconscripted in the holy war against Evil Sprawl.

But even if you accept the green argument in favor of more compact development it is quite unclear whether denial of highway capacity aborts or abets sprawl. Sure, poor highway service will have some tendency to encourage some people to leave their car at home and use rail, but it will also have the tendency to encourage others to relocate to where they can use their motor vehicle, reducing density.

“An expansion of I-287 (CWE) capacity would allow businesses to move further out into rural, undeveloped parts of the region and still be accessible by those workers,” wrote the major enviro coalition to NYSDOT, as if somehow it is the slowness of the road that is keeping the businesses from shifting further from their existing workers. But surely if highway conditions get too bad, the Westchester Co businesses will shift premises and find new workers, if not in nearby counties, then in Orlando or Atlanta or somewhere with better transport. Maybe the greens aren’t stupid after all, and really want the businesses to go away, and for Westchester Co to revert to more pastoral pursuits? With IBM and Pepsi out the whole county can become a sylvan retirement home for the 60s hippie lot?

Their stated alternatives to increased highway capacity are light rail and TDM (transp demand management). They make huge claims for TDM, but as NYSDOT argues in exasperated responses (Vol 2), it is already doing most of the advocated TDM and the effects on the roads are tiny, just a few percent. As for rail in place of the CWE upgrade NYSDOT penned this gem: “The typical rail transit user would have to drive, or take local transit to a parking lot/modal transfer facility, wait for a train, travel at noncompetitive operating speeds, exit at a station near or within the CWE alignment, transfer to a shuttle van or bus, and walk from the ground transport stop to their final destination...” (III-15) This light rail, it’s just not for real in the USofA, guys! Go play trains in your basement, not with peoples lives.

Personal: My first home in the US was in Tarrytown NY and the CWE the first American expressway I got to drive on a regular basis. Late one night in Nov 1980 I swung off a long ramp that turned into a 2-way. The ramp quite empty, my mind on other things, I reverted to intuitive left-side driving, Australian-style, and gave one hell of a fright to a poor guy who swung in to join the ramp in to the CWE. Maybe it was one of these greens I almost caught head on? (Contact: Brian Doherty NYSDOT 914 431 5870)