The Creepy, Yet Beautiful Street Art of Dan Witz Now in L.A.
Eye Nosh: Is This the Best Pastrami in America?
Does Traffic Get Worse After the End of Daylight Saving Time?
Silver Lake Art Crawl: Also a Food Truck Crawl?
Thomas Keller Comes Home: Book Signings and a Recipe(!)
Photo via Metro
A total of 5 members of the public showed up to last night's Metro congestion pricing, or fast lanes, meeting for the 10 and 110 freeways last night in South LA.
What is this? If you've ever been on the northbound 15 freeway in northern San Diego County, you as a solo driver may have noticed or taken part in the express lanes for a fee (carpoolers go for free). The same goes for the 91 in Orange County where, like the 15, pricing is variable depending on the time of day you drive it.
Streetsblog LA is calling Metro's version "watered down," noting that they even changed the tradtional name of "Hot Lanes" to "Fast Lanes." "The watered down proposal, which needs to go into place by December of 2010 to qualify for federal funds, wouldn't remove any cars from the current HOV Lanes," writes Damien Newton. "Transit vehicles, three passenger vehicles, hybrids, van pools, and in some places two passenger vehicles will all still ride for free in the converted HOV Lanes."
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Obviously, the other people were stuck in traffic.
From the report of the meeting it sounds like they're craming for finals or something. Trying to throw something, anything, together to keep from losing out on that $210 million in federal dollars before the deadline expires.
Is this SOP?
Is this why so many transit projects end up being so poorly planned?
I don't see how congestion pricing is going to help anybody during their commute, except for the wealthy people who can afford to pay the extra fee. Instead, they should scrap the carpool all together and use the extra lanes to build rail down the center of the freeways. Rails carry way more people than a lane on a freeway anyway.
I believe that HOT lanes can be very useful in many applications, but this proposal makes no sense.
First, unlike most HOT lane proposals, there is no addition of capacity, no new lanes to be constructed and operated -- with the financing to come from the fees paid, either in whole or in part.
Now, here's the part that is most concerning: "Transit vehicles, three passenger vehicles, hybrids, van pools, and in some places two passenger vehicles will all still ride for free in the converted HOV Lanes."
This violates one of the basic laws of physics -- two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Many of the HOV lanes in SoCal are already at or near their capacity and any further increase will produce major reductions in speed, which will defeat the entire purpose of HOV and HOT lanes. This is EXACTLY what happened a few years ago in the ill-starred conversion of the El Monte (I-10) Busway/HOV lane from HOV-3 to HOV-2; there were so many vehicles in the HOV lane that its speed dropped to that of the general purpose lanes, and the speed of the general purpose lanes didn't change.
Time to start over -- or just plain stop.
Obviously people are more interested in trains and subways and not their cars. HOV lanes are so 1980's