Driving, Driving and Even More Driving

You think people in this country drive a lot of miles? Well, you are absolutely correct. The most recent numbers from Federal Highway Administration prove the point. In typical government style the report is called Traffic Volume Trends and it's a monthly report based on hourly traffic count data reported by the states. According to the report, travel on all roads and streets declined by 10.7 billion vehicle miles in September 2008 as compared with September 2007. If that sounds like a lot of miles, you're right but it is a small percentage of the miles we as a nation drove in September. How many miles? How about 233 billion? The cumulative estimate for the entire year is 2.18 TRILLION miles of travel.

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Because of the rapid rise in the use of managed lane systems such as High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes (such as what is being built on the beltway in Virginia as a public/private partnership) or Express Toll Lanes (such as those being added by Maryland's transportation departments north of Baltimore along Interstate 95) governments are starting to think about making some changes. Specifically, should HOV-2 be changed to HOV-3 in areas where HOT lanes or Express Toll lanes operate?

A recent netconference titled "Are 3 heads Better Than 2?" tackled that very issue. One of the major points was that it may take the requirement of an additional passenger and therefore one less car on the road to reduce congestion enough to make these lanes an attractive alternative. The interesting thing is that in many cases these lanes are being built by private companies who need a certain amount of revenue to make the deal work for them. Yes, the governments would be helping these companies out by increasing the HOV requirements but they would also be going a long way to reducing the number of vehicles on the road and the amount of emissions that would result. Wrap your mind around that one:  governments helping private companies can make for a better environment.It's tough to accept but it may prove true.

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The Washington Times has been very tough on the District of Columbia's red light and speed camera programs, and with good reason, because there have been a number of rather questionable transactions.  The latest involved the procurement of the latest contract between the city and American Traffic Solutions, the Arizona-based company that manages certain elements of these systems. The interesting thing is that the paper ran the story in its Thanksgiving Day edition when readership is way down. It was like the paper was trying to bury a story that has all of the intriguing elements of government abuse. It points out that an auditor's report uncovered all sort of what it called "irregularities" in the $18-million contract. The article in the Times states: "Among the audit's findings were that members of a panel responsible for evaluating company proposals in 2006 made 'numerous mathematical, classification, omission and category evaluation errors' and were not required to correct them."

The most laughable thing contained in the Times' article is that the city is now developing a training curriculum to teach its employees how to analyze contracts. Hopefully it will also contain some refresher courses on basic math such as addition and subtraction. How did these people get these jobs in the first place?

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Steve Eldridge is a long-time reporter, observer and commentator on the Washington region's transportation issues. You can contact him directly by writing to: Steve@SprawlandCrawl.com. Unless otherwise requested, letters or portions of letters can be used within future columns. Letter writers will be identified by their first name and city/neighborhood.

Comments

[Sprawl and Crawl Steve]

You are correct that the Maryland project does not make any provisions for reducing fares for vehicles with multiple passengers. I think that is one of the real shortcomings of the project in that it doesn't incent commuters to join or to start carpools. On the topic of increasing the HOV requirements on I-95/395 to HOV-4 I don't think that's going to happen. That corridor has proven to be one of the better examples of HOV compliance in the country and I have heard of no moves to change it.

[Joe in SS]

Steve,
Correct me if I am wrong, but the Baltimore ETL's will have no exceptions for HOV traffic. Since the Shirley Highway HOV's are already HOV-3, are they talking about moving those back to HOV-4 like they used to be in the 70's and 80's?