CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Toll Lanes Aren’t Elitist; They’re Smooth Riding for All : The inaugural project in Orange County will prove the worth of some kind of universal freeway ‘congestion charge.’

Five years ago, Southern California’s smog and traffic outlook was bleak. Our traffic delays were the worst in the country, and, unlike the air situation, not improving. The average peak-hour road speed, then (and now) about 30 mph, was expected to drop to 11 mph by 2010. New roads cost too much. Not enough people would ride the subsidized bus, rail and carpool projects. We were in a mess and there seemed to be no way out of it.

Most of this gloom is still with us. But today there is a way out: peak-hour congestion charges, plus some kind of mileage-based emissions charge. The Southern California Assn. of Governments, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the California Air Resources Board, the National Research Council, the Reduce Emissions and Congestion on Highways (REACH) task force and the Environmental Defense Fund have studied potential impacts from peak-hour congestion charges and mileage-based emissions charges and concluded that the impacts could be huge and the costs not so huge.

The latest estimates conclude that a bundle of “moderate” incentives such as charges related to congestion, parking, fuel and emissions could cut current mobile-source ozone producers in the Los Angeles Basin by about one-seventh and congestion by half. A “high-impact” bundle including the same charges at higher rates, plus big transit investments, could cut ozone by more than one-third and virtually eliminate congestion delay. The savings to the average household from the “high-impact” bundle could be on the order of $2,000 a year, most of it in time saved from congestion relief.

The second big recent development is the actual construction and imminent opening of the Weir Canyon HOT (high-occupancy/toll) lanes on the Riverside Freeway (California 91) in Orange County. HOT lanes offer free access to vehicles with three or more riders; others pay a toll of up to $2.50, depending on time of day and direction.

By themselves, these HOT lanes are a bargain for everybody. They should save users 15 to 20 minutes of travel time in a 10-mile stretch. They also should save nonusers a few minutes by getting thousands of fast-lane users out of their way. And they should help clean the air by speeding traffic flow and rewarding carpooling. Eventually, they should make a tidy, well-deserved profit for the private firm that spent $126 million to build them.

But HOT lanes are not just a boon to people who drive them. They offer everyone an escape from our present transportation mess to a cleaner, faster and fairer alternative. HOT lanes are our best hope for making this transition.

How do we get from what we have now to what we need? Do we ask the government to order up the needed full-strength, full-scale system for tomorrow? Singapore essentially did that in 1975 and got away with it. The government imposed a simple, sticker-based downtown congestion charge and cut congestion in half virtually overnight. But no one expects us to move as far as Singapore or as fast. Our governments aren’t as unitary or strong, we have many more cars and we are not so tolerant of government mobility charges. The REACH task force, therefore, is split between those who want periodic odometer-based mileage fees with many exemptions and those who want HOT lanes.

Whether Southern Californians will ever want a full-scale congestion charge system remains to be seen. It would require a giant educational effort about its impacts generally and on the poor. Today’s studies say that those impacts are unlikely to be a serious problem. Congestion charges would get people where they want to go more quickly and more cheaply than any other strategy. Freed of huge, unnecessary delay costs, productivity--and presumably business investment--would rise. There would be more and better jobs for rich and poor.

Most poor people would not be directly affected by full-scale congestion charges because relatively few of them are on the road in automobiles during peak hours. Most of the poor who are on the road would come out equal or ahead from congestion charges, thanks to time savings. Studies show that the richest 20% of the driving public drives four times as many miles as the poorest, suffers almost four times as much delay and incurs 25 times as much delay cost. Even the 1% of the poor who might find full-scale emissions charges a burden could only be helped by HOT lanes, which give everyone a free alternative. For all the loose talk about “Lexus lanes” and “pricing the poor off the road,” the direct impacts of congestion charges on the poor would be small and mostly favorable. The indirect impacts in job creation would be larger and even more favorable.

On the other hand, annual odometer-based charges on vehicles registered in the Los Angeles Basin have grave problems. They lack proximity to the actual decision to drive. They cannot allow for differences in time and place of emission (upwind, summer morning driving does 30 times as much damage as does downwind, winter evening). They wrongly charge for out-of-basin driving by in-basin cars, but can’t catch out-of-Basin vehicles driving in-basin. They miss the high emissions from cold starts. They are subject to tampering and fraud.

All of these problems are curable, but only by using the same kind of monitoring that you would need for congestion charges--transponders or debit cards. And mileage charges on all roads would require two or three times as much monitoring as congestion charges on crowded roads only--and their immediate, tangible congestion-relief benefits would be much lower.

Nobody gripes about express mail or faxes or tries to ban them as “Lexus mail” that “prices the poor out of the fast lane.” HOT lanes are the same: They get everyone where they want to go faster and they slow no one down. The Orange County HOT lanes are a small step forward for their builder and for their users. They could be a giant leap to a faster, fairer future for Southern California.