Wake Up People! HOT lanes

Tonight we get to hear how the advisory board will advise. Hope to see you there at 7 PM.

November 1, 2005 - 7pm - 9:30pm
Springfield Interchange Project Office
6400 Commerce Street, Springfield

I think it is quite clear HOT as it stands will kill slugging, but to me there are primary considerations:

Goals:

Reduce waste of gasoline
reduce generation of air pollution
reduce waste of human time


To this point
1 HOV-3 (at least) ONLY must exist as they were
2 The primary force that I see driving people out farther is HOUSING cost. I could not afford a 300K house or a 200K house or even a 150K house (Search:June 2004 to October 2004). I had to go out to Ruther Glen to stay in our cost bracket. This was OUR consideration for where we would live. We HATE the 4 hours a day I need to commute, but even in Fredericksburg there is no room for families with one wage earner to live. The last I saw, prices are soaring to to new elevations at around 350K for a single family home with 2 or 3 bedrooms. Perhaps my family of 5 could live in an efficiency with 100 square feet, but I suspect at that point, we would move to a more FAMILY friendly area.

Under our FAMILY friendly administration (NOT) planning needs to include a way to help families to stay within a normal rather than an extreme commute
3 HOV 4 should be reconsidered (this would HELP slugging)
4 enforcement need to be increased with a recorded 20% violation
5 Why not use the funds for violation to extend the HOV
6 I like the idea of efficient vehicles in general, but they need to share as well. How about an HOV-2 phase in (or is this too complcated for the police force)?
7 I could not xcare less if the express lanes are toll at any other time. Just not toll during commute and no NON-HOV at any price during that time. Rich or well off people have a moral responsibility to help manage our world without trashing it as well.

No Bob, I'm 100% sure that it is a variable rate. Think about it: no one could be forced off the lanes once on; they would automatically clog. The whole dang thing relies on variable, i.e., dynamic, tolling which forces people off the toll roads as the per-mile rate rises. It absolutely has to change in each section, otherwise the system would have to keep track of each car's journey. With dynamic tolling, the system only has to charge every car that passes under the gantry the same amount -- it presumes, indeed it knows, that every car passing under it traveled X miles from the last entrance. The gantries and the tolling are linked to the distances from the entrances. As you travel through each section, you are charged the prevailing rate for that section. Which can change based on the amount of congestion.

Your suspicion that a single rate is unfair is why they are setting the system up with multiple gantries. There actually won't be a gantry at the entrance. There will be a gantry just BEFORE each entrance, charging a toll for the road you drove over since the previous gantry/entrance pair.

The sequence, since I'm being as clear as usual... is get on at an entrance, drive 3 (or 4 or 5) miles, then pass under a gantry that charges your Smartcard, say, $1.00 for 3 miles. Immediately after going under the gantry, there will be the next entrance to the toll road. Repeat. Exits can be positioned anywhere in the system, and likewise only have to charge for the distance from the last entrance. They do not need to calculate the whole trip, just the last section.

SpongeBob, I hope you are wrong about the gate to gate HOT flow management system. It will cause backups in the HOT lanes from discharging traffic as it hits the slow traffic in non-HOT lanes.

Has anyone seen this about Transurban, one of the teams competing for the HOT lanes project? It shows how they paid the Australian government to get out of certain contract provisions. I wonder if they might try that here in Virginia?

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/02/20/1013132446302.html

City Link $10m bid on contract
By GABRIELLE COSTA and ANDREW HEASLEY
September 20 2001


The owner of Melbourne's City Link tollway will pay the Victorian Government $10 million in an unprecedented deal to secure a change in its contract with the state.

In return for the payment, the government will legislate to allow Transurban to develop and sell its automatic tolling technology interstate and overseas.

The legislation will remove legal restrictions that ban Transurban from activities other than building and operating City Link.

The government unsuccessfully sought lower tolls for motorists as part of the new arrangements, but had to settle for a $10million consideration, payable in three roughly equal portions over three years.

"We asked for some tolls to be lowered but that's a very expensive exercise to enter into," Transport Minister Peter Batchelor said. "It didn't match up in negotiations."