Doug:

The answer to your question is not no, it is HELL NO! Thank you.

Doug, the point of carpool lanes is not spare capacity. The point is incenting people to use alternative forms of transportation to single-occupancy vehicles... all of which do far more to reduce congestion than "tolled express lanes". Heck, we should be tolling the non-express lanes.

Remember, that HOV lane may *appear* empty, but in most cases, I would be it's moving more passengers per mile than any other lane of the road.

Great article. Key point - HOT lanes are good for EVERY driver, regardless of whether that driver chooses to use them.

ericgoetz has the beginning of a great idea: toll single-occupancy vehicles whenever they use the Interstate highways -- then use the money to build adequate public transport: not just trolleys and trains, but trains that run on electricity and take advantage of the fact we (thanks to Bonneville and the New Deal in general) have the second cheapest electricity in the nation.

(Of course it won't happen: Big Oil and Big Automotive are too powerful, especially here in the Moron Nation province of Pugetopolis, where the car-huggers rule.)

Yeah; and let's start charging bicycles and foot passengers to pay for all their special sharrows, pathways on I-90, new bridge accomodating pathways, etc. Tolling only drivers is sickening and will cause a real backlash in automobileland.

Not another brochure about tolling.

How about some history about how we arrived at needing tolls on top of gas taxes? Or the gross unfairness of tolls and the hardship it places on those who can least afford them? Or why are we’re spending BILLIONS of extras dollars on transportation projects to provide favors for a few special interests?

Now that would be an article that would be of benefit to everyone.

Why not make the carpool lanes variable? As the number of cars goes up, increase the number of passengers required for the carpool lane.

@animalal; the reason to toll drivers, is because single occupancy vehicles use far more of the road than alternate forms of travel (e.g. transit, bicycle, pedestrians, etc). It's perfectly fair. Charge those who use the resource the most.

My opinion: You've heard of "plop art" or "plop development"? -in other words, predesigned features that are merely plopped into place with no regard for context. I feel that merely "plopping down" toll lanes into Seattle will carry with it the same sort of unintended consequences that might accompany any other "plop" project. Two things stand out to me.

One is socio-economic inequity. The poor are either tolled off the facility entirely, or must pay a greater share of their resources (as compared to a wealthier person) to use a common facility. This creates a systematic inequity related to users' ability to pay & may also disproportionately relegate the poor to certain areas if their travel is hampered. (This may have racial implications as well.)

The other is the health & well being of major arts programs & institutions- live music, theater, or dance; history & art museums; or even tourist draws such as Seattle Center or Pike Place. Tolling creates an impediment for regional visitors who might, like me, come from a couple of counties away to enjoy a day or evening in Seattle. Sure, this may prop up arts in surrounding areas if people turn away from "going into the big city" & instead focus on local offerings, but at the same time it could be devastating to the arts within Seattle.

Nobody but me seems to be talking about these sort of ancillary impacts. I guess we'll see what happens.

Normally, if given the choice, people prefer to get something for free than to pay for it. So when the question of roads’ tolling arises, it is natural for people to resist it. Having been paid for with gas taxes, roads are mostly free now. Why pay for them again?

But of course they need to be maintained and expanded as the population expands, and gas taxes are falling behind. And when a significant number of us switch to electric vehicles, the problem is going to accelerate. So new taxes of some kind are inevitable, and tolling is likely the way we are going to go. This is equitable in that those who use the roads, pay for them.

The kind of tolling that is levied makes a considerable difference though. What we are most used to is the flat-rate variety, such as found on some of our bridges. With flat-rate tolling it makes no difference whether you use the facility at 3am, when there is no traffic, or 3pm, when there is a lot. In other realms of our life, though, variable prices are familiar. The price of an airline ticket varies considerably, depending on when you want to travel. This is simply the balance of supply and demand applied to an airline ticket. Offer me a round trip ticket to Paris for $200, and I’ll likely drop everything and fly. Make it $2,000 and I’ll wait.

Balancing supply with demand also makes sense on our roads, particularly because roads have a strange characteristic not generally found elsewhere. And that is when they get too crowded, their ability to move traffic rapidly diminishes. Add cars to a freeway and volume goes up as speed diminishes. But add too many cars, and all at once both speed and volume drop precipitously. At that point, while the road may be a 4 lane freeway, it is carrying the equivalent of perhaps 2 lanes. In which case its capacity is cut in half exactly when capacity is needed the most, at rush hours. It’s as if hot molasses were quickly cooled, and, of course, cool molasses doesn’t flow very well. While everybody is familiar with this phenomenon, few have thought through its implications.

One implication is that we’re not getting anywhere near the capacity we paid for when we most need it. Another is that if we want to get that capacity back, we absolutely must regulate the flow of traffic onto our freeways. We try to do this with ramp metering, and that does work up to a point. Without ramp metering our freeways would work much worse during rush hours than they do today. But of course there is that qualifier, ‘up to a point’. It’s better than nothing, but …

The kind of variable pricing to be discussed here is called ‘dynamic’ pricing. What is dynamic about this kind of pricing is that it varies continuously with demand, changing every few minutes. From one perspective, this is ‘ramp metering on steroids’. Without getting into the details, using dynamic pricing it is possible to fill the freeway lanes to their exact maximum number of vehicles per hour, but no more (thus keeping the hot molasses from cooling).

If you dynamically price an existing HOV lane, continuing to let 2 or 3 person carpools use it gratis, then that is called a HOT (high occupancy/toll) lane. Because so many vehicles use it for free, such a lane does not produce a lot of net revenue. Of course if you ‘raise the bar’ so that only vanpools and buses are allowed to use it for free, then it produces a lot more revenue (and becomes a lot easier to police). It is also possible to make more than one lane each direction HOT, thus producing additional revenue.

As well as producing revenue, every lane that is HOT will carry the maximum amount of traffic. In doing so it will also benefit the adjoining (free) lanes, although not to the same extent as the priced lanes themselves. And you can make all lanes HOT, in which case you have a dynamically priced freeway.

A dynamically priced freeway (all lanes HOT) will always carry the maximum number of vehicles possible at all times. It will always be in equilibrium: supply = demand. And if the net revenue from tolling is applied to expansion and improvements on that facility, it will stay in equilibrium perpetually. Depending on political considerations, this is where we’re headed.

Next step: computer-controlled vehicles in certain lanes, allowing two or three times the through-put per hour.

What suggestion I do not see people making here is the number of children and non-licensed drivers being passed off as part of congestion reduction.

Isn't the purpose of a carpool lane to get more cars off the road? Well, then how does transporting children or other non-licensed drivers reduce the number of cars on the road? Answer: It's doesn't!

Allowing people that can't legally operate a motor vehicle to be used as carpool bait is not traffic reduction, it's pandering plain and simple. Not even proposing this in the article is purely thoughtless. Same goes for suspended drivers. Using them as carpool stock does nothing to reduce traffic. They can't legally drive a car anyway.

Why not just change the law to not include those two demographics? Then I will take seriously that the State of Washington is ready to get serious about traffic.

Ladies and gentlemen, we already have HOT lanes on 405. They are called HOV lanes. Many solo drivers choose to drive in the HOV lane, making an economic bet that the chances are low that they will get caught. If they drive in the HOV lane and get caught, they end up paying a really expensive, one-time toll (ie, a ticket). But if they don't get caught --- and more often or not they don't --- the toll is $0.

Our current system is just an arbitrary (get caught or not) and inefficient (no real traffic flow maximization) way of doing what Sec MacDonald has proposed --- HOT tolling on 405.

I'm a libertarian and don't like taxes one bit. But given the choice between the current arbitrary and inefficient use of HOV lanes as de facto HOT lanes, I would much rather see tolls, which are less arbitrary and offer the chance of traffic flow maximization.

It figures

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/eric-goetz/6/70/903

What it figures that Eric a college educated person can see the future while old guys rant about it being better in the old days? Got news for you, the price of fuel is going up and it isn't coming down. Better to make the best use of the resources we've already spent our money on than dream of more lanes of asphalt.

Right. Because "old guys" never went to college.

Not because Eric went to college and Cameron didn't. I suspect Cameron did, as he writes very fluently and is persuasive, even if in my opinion he's on the wrong side of the argument.

But because Cameron dismissed his argument, not with facts, but with a personal slander based on his youth.

Instead, I offer that if you knew that energy costs were going to triple in 20 years what would be the best plan to deal with that? My plan is that you build a transportation network that minimizes the cost of energy to run and maintain. We can see how energy inefficient SOV freeways are, and how encouraging people to share those vehicles doubles the passenger gas/mileage numbers. And how costly it is to add more lanes to the existing freeways. Better to get more utilization of the existing structure with some usage taxes. And build something that will still move people but for less cost/mile.

What exactly is slanderous about pointing out an obvious bias based on how an individual makes his livelyhood?