As part of our escape to the Florida Free State, I drove our minivan down I-95 from Maskachusetts. Mindy the Crippler and I hit traffic in Virginia, associated with an I-95 Express Lane extension project (massive traffic jams now with the promise of clear sailing in the future).
A friend who is an expert on these matters told me that the entire concept was a terrible idea. “Adding two express lanes in the middle of a highway requires building two extra shoulders and lots of overpasses for the exits,” he pointed out. “It is spectacularly high cost compared to adding two lanes to the main roadway.”
In other words, instead of having two new express lanes, for the same cost we could build six new lanes on the main road.
What about the congestion and tolling angle? These new express lanes will require a fee to be paid (or an EZ Pass set to “HOV mode”). If we had gotten organized with in-car transponder electronics and a display reading “You’re now being charged 30 cents/mile,” we could just designate the leftmost lanes of a wider main road as toll-required express lanes. It should also be safer and easier to have the HOV mode set automatically by the car, e.g., with weight sensors on the seats or an in-camera camera that can count the number of occupants and subtract for canines. (Our 2021 Honda Odyssey, relying on weight sensor alone, gets upset when Mindy the Crippler sits in the front seat and is not belted.)
We’ll be fueling inflation by printing money to spend on infrastructure (see “Inside Biden’s $4.5 Trillion Infrastructure Plan”). If my friend is right about the off-the-charts dumbness of the highway-inside-the-highways express lane idea, I wonder if most of the $4.5 trillion will be wasted.
Related:
- “Charging Drivers for Road Use Is Popular With Economists, Less So With Drivers” (Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2021)
To defeat automotive nagware complaining about seat belts Russian mitorists learned to use unattached buckles which they plug into the slot while the belt is unused. This solution will work for Mandy, too!
Sqrt(-1) to this, and a good reason car Pick-and-Pull “boneyards” still exist.
https://upullandpay.com/west-palm-beach/find-your-part/?Make=Honda&Model=Odyssey
No need to go for a boneyard, the belt connector is standardized, you can buy a fake plastic piece that fits most cars from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=car+belt+plug
These are widespread in the Middle East and SE Asia, for human passengers, along with a lower regard for safety.
In Massachusetts, having one would have been grounds for a summary tongue lashing from a neighbour, I’m pretty sure. Let’s see how it goes in Florida.
Of course multi-trillion $ so-called “infrastructure” build is mostly a pay off to political allies and friends and families of Biden, Pelosi and other politicians. It has no plans to build any new roadways, according to the link in the article. All small expense % that is roadwork related is already covered by state and federal taxes and fuel taxes. The only useful expense could potentially be building new powerlines, it it done in the manner to boost infrastructure security with rad-hard hardware but I highly suspect it is a sinister pay-off as well and will not result in more secure power grid. When needed electric companies build powerlines quickly for new customers without any public expense, anticipating profits to be made
So because the plan is to repair 20,000 miles of roads but not build any new ones, that automatically makes it a give away to… Nancy Pelosi?
Sure @Nancy, who else created this $3.5 or $4.5 trillion mostly unrelated to infrastructure busywork that came out of congress controlled by Nancy Pelosi? Reminds me “first things first” “cash for clunkers” Obama’s achievement from prior Pelosi’s congress that helped back then create Tea Party movement and helped Republicans to win US House. Highway repairs and extensions come form regular highway taxes. Somehow it works in Florida, Georgia and many other states.
Make this “US House of Representatives controlled by Nancy Pelosi”, not congress.
The 237/880 interchange was built that way, 22 years ago. The center express lanes stayed closed for another 10 years while construction continued on widening the landings. Sales tax was raised to a whopping 7.5% to pay for it. The temporary 1/2 cent increase was the last tax increase we would ever need, before today’s 10% sales tax was the last tax increase we would ever need.
California is like Europe (massive VAT), but without all of the government-provided services!
We are getting extensive HOV lanes on freeways in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’d be interested to understand the argument for this. You take a freeway with 4 lanes, and designate one of the lanes as HOV. Voila, you’ve now decreased capacity of the freeway by 10-25%, since many drivers are either solo or unwilling to pay extra for the privilege.
I guess the idea is that this will so encourage carpooling as therefore result in less cars? Seems very unlikely to offset the decreased capacity of the HOV lane. In addition, if 50% of the drivers somehow miraculously decided to carpool, people would just move further out, to escape the punishing prices of living near where the jobs are…thereby offsetting the gain.
Can anyone explain the logic of HOV lanes?
The idea of carpooling is a joke. Chances of being able to coordinate with others to carpool to a destination (and back) is so low: 1) you need to find or have ready someone to ride with you to / from your end points, and 2) that someone will need to be near you or on your to / from path.
This is from 2015 [1] and shows that 9.5% of drivers carpool. The study does NOT say how *often* this 9.5% actually carpool, my guess the number is very, very low other wise Uber and Lift would not have a market.
True story: I know of 2 separate couples that work at my former big-tech company; they all worked in the same building. The husbands and the wifes each leave to work in the morning and come back home in the evening, in their own car. I asked one of the husbands why don’t you drive in 1 car? The answer: we want the flexibility of when we leave home / work and going out with co-workers at lunch time.
[1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/acs/acs-32.pdf
I’ve said this for years when the HOV lane frenzy began. They take up at least two and in some cases three extra lanes of real estate.
As pointed out road construction is all political grift, and environmental study grift.
We can’t build anything anymore, just the way it is.
I still vote that before we build any more express lanes or HOV lanes we teach people how to drive well in traffic and not gawk at accidents or slow to a crawl every time a cop pulls someone over or lanes have to merge, but I know that ship has sailed.
I also once thought of a phone app./website that would let people living in Chicago in the same big, high rise buildings with parking garages carpool more easily and/or establish their own pseudo-taxicab service to downtown destinations, thereby preventing thousands upon thousands of cars from converging onto Lake Shore Drive twice a day, turning it into a parking lot while everyone wasted an hour each way to go within a few blocks of each other.
I started designing and writing that system and then got sidetracked by someone who wanted me to write a doctoral dissertation in Psychology for her instead…
“Women will be raped if they get in cars with strangers, do you want more women to be raped? They should just ride the EL! If more people rode the EL we wouldn’t need SUVs! If you fix the traffic people will just buy more SUVs! And women will be raped!”
“I have to go to the library to do research but I hate doing that, can you go instead and pick up these articles for me?”
Please, please, say you didn’t do it. Being her doormat is no way to a woman’s heart or other organ.
@Socrates: I wrote 3/4ths of the dissertation, it was great with a single revision cycle, she got the degree, then I found out something really nefarious. I pulled the plug, got the shaft and moved far, far away. Long story. This thread isn’t supposed to be about me but maybe Philg knows you. If he does and likes you, etc., he can give you my email address and I’ll tell you the whole story. I spent a lot of money and a lot of time, and as Bob Seger sings: “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” But I do, and I have a lot to say about it.
Ugh! What a waste. But you’ve still got a very lively mind and seem to do all kinds of things and have had all kinds of experiences. So you’re living life despite the horrors. Keep doing it!
@Socrates: Thanks and will do, as best I can. I seem a little scatterbrained sometimes but it’s not as bad as it seems. Learning the difference between idealism and the Real World can be difficult and painful, but everyone needs to do it in one way or another, or they’re guaranteed to suffer. That’s not to say you can’t be idealistic, but you can’t live blind either – unless you’re very fortunate and/or sheltered, or deeply deluded. The offer still stands if Philg knows who you are. I’m always happy to “meet” his true friends and I value them highly.
Actually I’m not a friend of philg, although I admire his sharp mind and find interesting his contrarian thinking. philg’s Real World Divorce identified a huge public problem … and few care. Crazy world.
Right now I’m going through some serious health problems. Assuming I get through ok (and you do, too), I live in the DC area and occasionally get up to Waltham, MA area. Maybe we could get together sometime next year. Would love to hear more of your stories in person.
Socrates: Maybe we’re not friends because I have no friends! (But come to https://www.marriott.com/hotels/fact-sheet/travel/pbija-courtyard-palm-beach-jupiter/ and I will be happy to take you out to lunch! We can’t offer to host you since we’re living in a 2BR apartment with LEGO all over the floor, but the Marriott is essentially across the street and is fairly cheap most of the year.)
(Separately, http://realworlddivorce.com/ can be seen as identifying a huge public OPPORTUNITY, i.e., have sex with a married dermatologist in Massachusetts and spend the next 23 years with more spending power than if one had gone to medical school and worked as a primary care doctor, or have sex with Hunter Biden, move back to (unlimited child support jurisdiction) Arkansas before pushing the baby out, and bank $2.5 million in immediate tax-free cash (see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9203029/Hunter-Bidens-baby-mama-engaged-amateur-MMA-fighter-raising-baby-own.html ). For whatever reason, most Americans think it is good that having sex pays better than working at a W-2 job and therefore I think it is fair to say that we have the system that we collectively want.)
philg, if you get crowded, there’s an old-school internet billionaire housed just down the road. Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics, Netscape) has a sea-to-sound estate in Palm Beach. He’s also into helicopters and yachts (300-ft Athena).