Thursday March 15, 2007
Let's charge for high-speed lanes on I-95
OK, let me see if I understand this correctly. We take the HOV lane on I-95 and turn it into a toll lane. Actually, two toll lanes. Then you make the toll variable, and increase it such that a car on those lanes can always travel at 50 mph.
Where to start with this one? OK let’s put aside the “What?! You can easily add an extra lane? Why didn’t you fucking morons do that about two decades ago?!?!” and concentrate on the larger questions this proposal raises. Now, I ride I-95 daily (against the traffic, and at off-peak hours, thank Jesus), so I see the hell that downtown 9—5ers go through. I also see their cars, and rest assured that a good number of these people are comfortable enough in terms of salary and uncomfortable enough in terms of traffic frustration that I think a lot of them are going to be willing to jump in to this program.
And a lot of them jumping in is going to mean that traffic in those two lanes is going to slow down. Raising the toll. How high will it go? In 2002, I-95 in Miami served 260,000 cars per day (most recent data). It’s generally about 5 lanes each way. If you instead have 4 regular lanes + 2 toll lanes, the toll needs to be such that 20% of the drivers are willing to pay it just to break even on the non-toll lanes. But common sense suggests that 20% of I-95’s traffic spread across two lanes is going to travel much slower then 50mph. This means that tolls will need to be so high that less then 20% of commuters will not be able to afford them even under traffic conditions worse then they are today. How much would you be willing to pay? $2.50 (roughly the cost of a similar trip on the Turnpike)? $5? $10? And how much would the richest 15% of commuters be willing to pay?
Let’s do the math with the most conservative figures we have. If we assume that traffic is still 260,000 cars per day, and if 15% of those cars across 2 lanes results in 50mph, and if $5 is the most those 15% are willing to pay (i.e. the folks in the 16th percentile are unwilling to pay), and assuming 50 5-day work weeks per year, you’re looking at around $50 million in revenue per year, and you’re starting to get an idea of what the actual motivation behind this suggestion might be. Charge for high-speed lanes on I-95? Let’s not and say we did.
Homework: An interview with Reid Ewing (pdf), in which he describes in some detail how ass-backwards South Florida’s transportation system is, and what we could actually do about it.
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On the subject of truly bad ideas, let’s take photos of the interstate while driving our cars on them at 65 mph in heavy traffic.