HOV COUNT The Cunningham Card Reader

HOV COUNT

The Cunningham card reader

A great weakness of the High Occupancy innovation (HOV/HOT) is the difficulty of establishing day by day who is cheating. Visual counts suggest the proportion of cheaters — vehicles without the requisite numbers of persons per vehicle — ranges betweeen 3% and 10% on barriered HOV and 8% to 30% on striped facilities. Everywhere in the US HOV enforcement is some variation of the Olde Wild West Ambush with a police trooper and his car randomly placed for an hour or so on the central or median shoulder hidden over a hill or around a bend in order to surprise and visually spot HOV violators and pull them over for ticketing. The procedure is expensive, so infrequent as to be arbitrary and ineffective, and it usually disrupts traffic flows. Various efforts have been made to develop an imaging system to move toward automatic counting system but nothing has yet been deployed on a routine basis. The Texas Transportation Institute has a development project under way using side and frontal videocameras and special lighting and at Georgia Tech there is a project using infra-red imaging but it is unclear how far these will succeed. If HOV/HOT projects are to thrive it seems this will depend eventually on automating the process of validating high vehicle occupancy.

HDOV? Ron Cunningham and colleagues at Lockheed Martin IMS have come up with the smartest technical idea I’ve heard of. At a recent panel discussion at the ITS America meeting, Cunningham proposed that HOV occupant counting be done by issuing drivers licenses as some kind of magstripe or smart card. A toll transponder in the vehicle would be equipped with a card reader and when entering a HOV/HOT lane the various drivers licenses would be swiped through the reader to signal the number of drivers license holders in the vehicle. Swapping of drivers licenses would be deterred by the law that requires drivers to have their license with them whenever they drive. This would end the use of children and other non-drivers as eligibles for the HOV count, but Cunningham points out that the whole idea of HOV lanes is to get otherwise solo drivers to carpool. So the concept of HOV counting could well be changed to HDOVs (High Driver-Occupant Vehicles.) Transport economist and consultant Gabriel Roth goes further. He has argued that the whole US procedure for counting occupants is unnecessary when roads are tolled, because there is already an incentive to carpool in that the toll is split among the poolers as opposed to having to be paid entirely by the single driver. (Contacts Shawn Turner TTI 409 845 8829, Ron Cunningham LMIMS 201 996 7143, Gabriel Roth 301 656 6094)