Hybrids - a threat to car-pooling?

From the presentations at Monday's Town Hall - their current projection for HOT on 95/395 was $.20 per mile (if you commute from Dumfries that works out to around $3000/yr with daily use) slightly more expensive than $2 "to be able to get to work in a hurry if pressed for time." They continued to say that they would increase the price to a point to discourage use to the point of congestion. What would that price look like $2 or $3 per mile?

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Originally posted by Trotski99
[br]Having two HOV lanes sit virtually empty while three "regular" lanes are totally jammed is not a solution to our region's traffic problems. I think the focus should be on improving congestion for ALL commuters rather than just for the environmentally "elite".

It seems to me that if the problem is "congestion" then we should build more roads.

The problem now is that not enough drivers are interested in sharing their vehicles with strangers and there aren't enough strangers willing to spend their mornings hitchhiking to work. Making the restrictions even more severe would only exacerbate the problem.

HOV has cost the public billions of dollars and the congestion for the average commuter is worse now than before.

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If there were two lanes that were virtually empty there wouldn't be so many complaints about hybrids. The fact is that the two HOV lanes move more people than three regular lanes during peak congestion. Maybe you should research the situation more before spouting off uninformed opinions. The HOV lanes are at capacity(which doesn't mean bumper to bumper) which tends to discount your thought of "not enough drivers are interested in sharing their vehicles with strangers and there aren't enough strangers willing to spend their mornings hitchhiking to work". If the HOVs were no longer HOV you would have enough cars to jam up 6 lanes of traffic to the level that the current regular lanes are congested, but you would only have 5 lanes so congestion would be worse than it currently is on the regular lanes.
You can't blame HOVs for traffic getting worse, they work. When the HOVs and the regular lanes are at capacity the only people you can blame are the politcians(and the people that elect them) for not setting the right priorities and providing ways to move more people. Guess what, HOT isn't going to move more people. It will add one lane but push more people out of HOV resulting in more than enough cars to fill that extra lane. But now you will have to be one of the "elite" in order to buy one of those spots. It will also prevent any real solutions for the regular lanes since I'm sure there will be a no-compete clause in the contract making any improvements to the regular lanes impossible till the lease is up in 40 years.
HOT will maximize revenue, not maximize moving people.

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Originally posted by Wagonman
It will also prevent any real solutions for the regular lanes since I'm sure there will be a no-compete clause in the contract making any improvements to the regular lanes impossible till the lease is up in 40 years.

HOT will maximize revenue, not maximize moving people.

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I totally agree. The reason that these unsolicited proposals were offered is that VDOT has no money bugeted for these NOVA highways and there are private companies that are looking to make some bucks -- I cannot blame them for trying. The goal is to move people HOV works.

http://home.comcast.net/~robertlangdirect//SAVEHOV.ppt
Mr. Lang: You make an assumption that repealing the hybrid exemption will increase total commuter throughput. I suspect that you need to take a survey of hybrid drivers to see what percent would pick up slugs, what percent would become slugs, and what percent would go into the regular lanes.

Without a survey, you should re-run your graphs based on first 100% going into each category (and, of course, 0% in the other 2), then perhaps an assumption of some mixture.

I still think it's either exemption or toll in the short run.

Communism would have worked too if everyone would have just been satisfied with having the same things as everyone else and everyone just did as they were told. In the end it just turned out to be an unworkable situation because people are selfish and will usually only do things in their own self-interest unless they are rewarded or coerced into doing otherwise.

This goes to my central point. If people are unwilling to do something (in this case carpool with strangers every morning) then it is not going to work. The problem with HOV is that it depends on behavior modification that is contrary to the way people want to live their lives.

If HOV logic were extended to other situations it would seem rediculous. Let's say you could only go to the store more than once a week to go shopping unless you took one of your elderly neighbors with you. It sounds like a laudable idea. There are a lot of elderly people who can't get to the store on their own and it would be nice to enact a law that would "encourage" people to take the elderly shopping. The problem is that there wouldn't be enough elderly to go around for everyone to go to the store. You'd have to spend 10 more minutes of your day waiting for grandma to get in and out of your car.

When I look at the HOV lanes now I am happy to see the hybrids because at least there are some cars in the lanes! Before the hybrids were let in they were completely empty. Even now if you're stopped in the general traffic lanes you can look to your left and count to 20 sometimes during the pause between cars. These lanes need to be opened up to more traffic in one way or another. There is no reason why they should sit empty while the other lanes are stopped.