Congestion Insurance: ``Hot" Lanes' Amazing Promise Neal Peirce WASHINGTON--Congestion insurance? A guarantee--at a price--that you can switch to a freely flowing lane and quickly navigate a metro area's freeway system? The idea sounds wild, but it was the subject of a very serious news conference at the Capitol last week. The basic idea is called HOT lanes--a system of "high-occupancy/toll" lanes, some converted from today's often-underutilized HOV lanes, others constructed new along the urban interstates. They'd be accessible to any driver who opts to pay the extra cost for use of a premium lane free of traffic hold-ups. Payment would be through computerized monitors able to read dashboard-mounted transponders and record each vehicle's use of a HOT lane. The fees, displayed to drivers on electronic billboards, would rise and fall--perhaps to as high as 35 cents or 40 cents a mile--to keep the lanes free-flowing. Put another way, the result would be perfectly market-responsive pricing. Two such systems have been operating successfully for several years in California's Orange and San Diego counties. Studies have found the actual users are spread demographically--indeed more are reported to drive utility vans and delivery trucks than luxury autos. The idea has been developed and pushed by Robert Poole of the Reason Public Policy Institute, a Los-Angeles-based libertarian think tank, and Kenneth Orski, a former U.S. Department of Transportation official, founder of the Washington-based Urban Mobility Corporation and harsh critic of most "smart-growth" solutions to transportation problems. But in their presentation news conference in which they offered up hard dollar figures on what it would cost to inaugurate a HOT system in eight major U.S. metro regions, Poole and Orski expanded their ideological tent to include representatives from the American Auto Association, Environmental Defense and the Progressive Policy Institute. There's a new, critical element in this HOT lane proposal--public transit. The HOT lanes wouldn't be reserved just for paying private vehicles. They'd also become high-speed guideways, without cost, for local transit authorities' express buses, plus vanpools. Bus Rapid Transit--BRT--is coming on fast on the worldwide public transit scene. The idea of large, modern buses on exclusive rights-of-way has made progress in Pittsburgh, northern Virginia, Los Angeles and approaches to New York City. Several emulate successful systems in Curitiba, Brazil, Bogota and Ottawa. Conservatives tend to like BRT systems because they usually cost a lot less than new fixed-rail transit systems. Liberals like them because they promise quality and mobility for areas that might otherwise wait decades for adequate transit service. With HOT lanes, BRT could enjoy guaranteed metrowide speeds and schedules, comparable to rail systems. Indeed, for toll-paying private vehicles and buses alike, Poole and Orski want to go much further than replacing HOV lanes with toll service. They talk expansively of full regionwide commuter systems. They've calculated the likely routes and costs, filling of existing gaps included, for eight major U.S. regions. Houston, for example, would end up with a 500-lane-mile HOT system, way up from the 133 HOV freeway lane miles it now has, at a cost of $3.6 billion. Seattle's system would be 505 lane miles, up from 205 HOV lane miles now, for $4.3 billion. For the eight regions surveyed, tax-exempt revenue bonds would cover about two-thirds of the $43 billion in capital required. The federal and state governments would pay the rest from their gas-tax-funded trust funds--and they also would have to approve tolls, now prohibited, for HOV lanes on interstates. For these mega-appropriations and statute changes, big benefits could flow. Billions of dollars in congestion costs could be saved. Installing responders on autos would provide an information base for valuable new traffic-guidance technology. HOT lanes, notes Michael Replogle of Environmental Defense, can help curb sprawl and pollution by reducing the demand for outer beltways and other "roads that drive more jobs to places people without cars can't go." Yet there could be downsides. Soaring highway "flyovers," designed to avoid existing freeway choke points, could be ugly contraptions in the sky. New elevated freeway lanes--especially prominent in the proposals for Washington and Los Angeles--might create blight instead of contributing to a sense of place and community. Indeed, will these systems produce more than efficient "throughput" of vehicles? Will we see efficient and attractive "intermodal" links to the promising new generation of transit-oriented shop-office-residence centers, regional rail systems, ferries and the like? And aren't there some downtowns or constellations of neighborhoods so dense or fragile that light rail or subway systems might be a superior solution? So as promising as HOT lanes seem, we need to remember they're just one of the transportation innovations we'll need to try out to achieve more mobile--and livable--21st-century regions. Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com. More Neal Peirce columns