HOT and Bothered

                  

HOT and Bothered

High-Occupancy Toll lanes: another nightmare from the suburbs-hating traffic planners

The Weekly Standard, April 14, 2014, Johnathan V. Last

HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes are all the rage in transportation engineering. Over the last few years, they’ve mushroomed across the country: from I-85 in Georgia to I-95 north of Miami; from I-394 and I-35 in Minnesota to I-15 in Utah. California is lousy with them, of course: The I-10, the I-15, and the I-110 all have HOT lanes. There’s even a HOT lane on a lowly state road in California, SR-237. That’s outside of San Jose, and the toll there fluctuates between 30 cents and $6.00 for the privilege of driving a four-mile stretch of road. All told, there are 21 HOT lane projects up and running in America today. More are in the works.

HOT lanes have a small, but potent, constituency. Progressives, who reflexively support any measure that makes living in the suburbs more costly—their ultimate aim being to nudge people into dense, urban cores—see HOT lanes as a check on suburban sprawl. On the other side, libertarians view HOT lanes as a perfect instrument of free-market economics, allowing consumers to put a dollar value on their time by choosing to pay their way out of traffic—and in turn fostering smaller government by offloading public responsibility for roadways onto private companies. Both sides are, to a certain extent, correct. HOT lanes are wondrously useful to divergent ideological agendas.

The question of whether or not they work is another matter.

Read this powerful article at The Weekly Standard