Articles

Life in the Fast Lane

Transportation planners aren't designing the Interstate 95 HOT lane project just for solo drivers willing to pay tolls. A key goal is to shift commuters into vans, buses and carpools.

by Robert L. Burke

You would think Rick Hood would be thrilled about plans to build 56 miles of HOT lanes along Interstate 95 in Northern Virginia. If the project goes as expected, Hood’s 60-vehicle ABS Vans commuter service in Stafford County has a good chance to add even more paying customers. There will be more lanes, more on-ramps and more park-and-ride lots. Best of all, Hood’s vans will still travel the new lanes for free while one- and two-passenger vehicles pay.

But HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes leave Hood cold. Even though the project proposes expanding and extending the current HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes, a frustrated Hood fears it will bring only more congestion by putting more cars in the new lanes. “If they’re going to to take up existing HOV space and call them HOT lanes, that’s the wrong move,” he says. “You can’t put more cars on the road and choke off HOV lanes.”

Fluor and Transurban, the companies building the project, promise to keep the HOT lanes congestion-free even during rush hour by hiking tolls. Still, Hood’s skepticism is understandable. There’s a lot of uncertainty about how this massive makeover is going to work. And one of the biggest unknowns is how transit service – buses, vanpools and the like – will be affected. Fluor Transurban has pledged $390 million for transit and TDM (traffic demand management) improvements, but nobody knows exactly how the money will be spent – or how well it will spur the current transit providers to ferry even more commuters.

Some answers come next month when the state Department of Rail and Public Transportation unveils a set of recommendations produced by a study launched early this year. The study was overseen managed by a committee of about 20 people, including representatives from localities and regional groups such as the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG).

“This study is … a detailed analysis [of] what’s the best bang for the buck,” says Corey Hill, DRPT’s chief of transit. Some general strategies have been identified already, such as more park-and-ride spaces, new buses and bus routes, expansion of commuter rail and improvements to the 12 existing bus stations in the 56-mile corridor.

Hill says adding bus rapid transit service is being considered too. “Our initial analysis is showing that it is performing fairly well, so that is on the table,” he says. “We’ve been able to find good-performing improvements in virtually every jurisdiction.”

Commuting in Virginia may be dominated by motorists driving solo, but there is a substantial number of transit options in the I 95/395 corridor. About 500 independent vanpools ferry commuters, and more than 90 buses per hour travel the northern portion of the corridor on the existing HOV lanes. Plus, there are 19 slug locations and 15 park-and-ride lots run by counties or the Virginia Department of Transportation.

Not everybody can use transit services, obviously, and many simply don’t want to. But in this corridor, a lot do. A VDOT study of the morning commuting period showed that about two-thirds of the trips heading north on one portion of the I-95 corridor were made in buses, vans or multiple-rider autos, “which is a truly amazing market share,” Hill says. “The are a great range of options available to people in the corridor.”

The Fluor Transurban project calls for expanding the existing 28-mile-long stretch of two-lane HOV lanes to three HOT lanes in the initial phase of construction, which is supposed to start next year and be done in late 2010. In a second phase, two new HOT lanes would extend another 28 miles south to Spotsylvania County. The corridor would have a total of 33 new entry and exit points. Fluor Transurban insist that carpools, vanpools and buses would travel free on the HOT lanes. Prices would be raised on solo drivers to whatever price it took to keep the traffic flowing freely.

One strategy to bolster shared ridership is persuading more employers to offer financial incentives for employees who commute. Many federal agencies are required to offer the subsidies, which can run as high as $110 monthly for transit (rising to $115 in January) and $120 for parking. While 76 percent of federal employees were offered transit incentives, according to an MWCOG survey of commuters done earlier this year, just 20 percent of private-sector employees were. Plus, 69 percent of people surveyed said employers offered them free parking – not much of an incentive to try transit.

“Obviously there’s some work to do,” says Nicholas Ramfos, director of MWCOG’s Commuter Connections program. He says most of the large employers in the Washington region do offer some kind of transit support, but many others just don’t think of it. If HOT lanes deliver on their promise to give shared-ridership commuters a predictable trip to work, the pinch of $3-per-gallon gasoline might induce more drivers to give up their autos. Says Ramos: “I think it will increase the prospects for more commuters to use some type of shared ride alternative.”

It might not be easy to get people to switch. Hill with the DRPT says market research shows that, even with the HOT lane option, most people plan on sticking with their current form of commuting. “There is tremendous loyalty” among commuters, he says. "Our lives are so complicated, your transportation mode choice is almost a lifestyle choice.”

In the Fredericksburg area, there’s some worry that commuters won’t have much of a choice because the region could get shortchanged on transit improvements. Lloyd Robinson, director of transportation planning for the George Washington Regional Commission, says planners working on the DRPT recommendations are using bad data to the decide where to spend the $390 million. That data predicts population will rise 38 percent in the region (which includes Caroline, King George, Spotsylvania, Stafford and the city of Fredericksburg) between 2015 and 2030, while the number of commuters heading to jobs outside the region will rise just 13 percent.

“That struck some of us as counterintuitive,” Robinson says. “The problem for us is that projection in the modeling means you really don’t need that many parking spaces or transit services” in the southern localities. The projections assume robust job growth in the region, Robinson says, and “obviously everybody shares that desire... The question is, how do we get from having that as a goal to achieving it?”

Vanpooling will likely get a significant boost in the recommendations, Robinson says. Hood of ABS Vans says some change is long overdue, noting that rail transit such as the Virginia Railway Express gets government subsidies while vanpool operators “take 100 percent of the risk. And we can get to more areas without train tracks than any other service.”

Fredericksburg-area localities also have been fretting over the timing of the project. While the existing HOV lanes are supposed to be operational as HOT lanes by late 2010, the southern 28 miles of new lanes won’t open until 2014, says Tim Young, development manager for Transurban. But the southern localities will get some help before then, he says: Some of the new park-and-ride spaces will be constructed in the southern end while the northern half of the project is being built.

“So, we are bringing the benefits we can on the transit side as quickly as possible,” he says. Some of the expected improvements could make a big difference in areas that have only scattered facilities for bus or van service. Robinson says new “inline” stations are planned, which will create new direct links between the HOT lanes and local commuter lots. “Every several minutes there’d be a bus during the peak hours” that would carry commuters to major employment centers such as Tysons Corner or the Pentagon, or to other transit systems such as Metrorail.

Other features the HOT-lane designers plan: flyover lanes that will let drivers exit the HOT lanes and enter the main lanes from the right side. That makes it easier for those drivers to access right-side exits without having to cut across three lanes of traffic. Plus, the three-lane design of the northern section will be extended another nine miles before becoming two lanes. “That’s going to let traffic slowly blend itself,” Young says. He also points out that the completion of the northern section will help generate the money to pay for transit improvements down south. “That’s probably the biggest imperative, to get that project done and get the funding available.”

The DRPT recommendations will go through Secretary of Transportation Pierce Homer and the Commonwealth Transportation Board. Many of the details about how transit works will work won’t be settled until the spending decisions are finalized. Once his region knows how much it will get for commuter bus service, Robinson says, it can then start contracting with private-sector providers.

The HOT lanes study highlights how inscrutable the transportation planning process can be. Transit decisions are being based in part on land-use projections that reflect what a locality hopes to be, which isn’t necessarily the same as what it will be. And the HOT lanes themselves may accelerate growth in the southernmost counties grow by making it even easier for Washington-region employers to siphon workers from that labor pool. Too much congestion moves the jobs, while less moves the workers. It’s a hard call to say which is better.

-- December 17, 2007