Check out The Washington Post editorializing in favor of HOT lanes to relieve congestion in the nation’s capital.
What is going on here? DC has had a Metro system for 30 years now. It cost billions. Yet there is still traffic congestion. And the Post is not exactly some hard-core free market outfit hostile to “mass transit” in any form. So why the support for high occupancy toll lanes? Well, HOV lanes have had 20 years to work and have not. The Metro system is fully built-out. No one can possibly claim that more trains are the answer.
Thus the Post observes:
Every projection suggests that the region’s population growth will yield additional congestion that is likely to outstrip the road network’s capacity to absorb it. The most that can be expected from planners — and it is already a lot — is that they embrace forward-thinking strategies to mitigate growth’s impact.
By that measure, a proposal to build high-occupancy toll lanes along Interstates 95 and 395 in Virginia, along with a similar plan already in the works for a segment of the Capital Beltway in Virginia, makes sense. So-called HOT lanes, in use for more than a decade in California and elsewhere, use congestion pricing to prevent backups; electronic tolls on designated lanes would rise and fall according to demand, thereby ensuring that traffic keeps moving.
The Post concludes, “Like most traffic modifications, HOT lanes are a tradeoff, but this proposal looks like one whose benefits outweigh the costs.”
It is exactly a sane cost-benefit analysis that is missing from CATS’ train-building plans. Once CATS’ breaks ground on the $373 million North line, it will be until 2030 before HOT lanes will be a live option for congestion relief on I-77.
Let’s repeat that. The current state-of-the-art thinking in urban congestion relief is off the table for next 20 years in Charlotte so we can build trains instead. And we’ll spend billions in the process.
Perversely, because it is an intra-beltway line, the mere existence of the $500 million South line is not as much of an obstacle to adding HOT lanes to the strained southern leg of 485. However, the ongoing operating costs of the line will be a future budget drag and the sunk cost forever represent money that could have been spent more wisely.
Unless voters force a different, better path.
