The Price of Breaking Up Gridlock
Every day, hundreds of thousands of San Fernando Valley residents crawl through the 101 / 405 interchange, one of the state’s worst freeway bottlenecks.
If you’re one of them, perhaps you’ve resigned yourself to thinking that this kind of gridlock is the price you pay for living in the Valley and working elsewhere. But if you’re like me, this kind of performance failure of our highway system makes you angry.
Think about it. In every other form of major infrastructure--airlines, electric power, telecommunications--if you don’t like the quality of service, you can either take your business to another provider or you can pay more for higher-quality service.
Only in the highway system are you stuck with one-size-fits-all poor quality, unless you happen to live in Riverside County and work in Orange County, commuting via the Riverside Freeway. In that congested corridor, motorists for the past three years can either poke along in the regular lanes or pay a few bucks to zip along at 65 mph in the 91 Express Lanes, developed and operated by a private company. Surveys show that most people use the express lanes only occasionally, when they really have to be someplace on time. But they overwhelmingly like to have the choice of “first-class” or “coach” service.
Why can’t Valley residents have this kind of choice? In a new policy study, my colleagues and I suggest how to use this kind of approach to decongest the Valley’s 101 / 405 bottleneck. Specifically, we propose adding express lanes along the median of the 101 from Woodland Hills to the 101 / 134 / 170 interchange, widening the 101 by one lane in each direction (so that no free lanes would be lost). And we propose converting the current high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane on the 405 to an express lane open to any paying customer, and extending it southward through the Sepulveda Pass.
In addition, we propose express-lane connectors across the 101 / 405 interchange, allowing express-lane traffic to cross over it.
A large array of users would benefit from such an approach. We propose that emergency vehicles be exempt from paying to use the lanes, dramatically improving response to emergencies. Further, transit vehicles could also use the express lanes at no charge, transforming the 101 and 405 into express busways that could dramatically improve transit service.
In addition, we suggest that carpools also be able to use the lanes at no charge. Besides these three categories of free users, everyone else would be able to use the lanes whenever they decided that the time savings would be worth the price (which we estimate would be from 75 cents to $4 to go the length of the 101 at 65 mph, depending on the time of day).
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The generic term for such express lanes is high-occupancy / toll lanes, or HOT. Advocates of HOT lanes recognize that few people can arrange their lives to make car-pooling feasible--but that everyone ought to have the option of bypassing congestion when they have to be someplace on time.
How much would all this cost? Acquiring the lane and building new lanes along the 101 would cost about $178 million. On the 405, developing HOT lanes instead of the planned HOV lanes would add only a few percent (for electronics) to what is already budgeted. The big-ticket item is the set of overcrossings to decongest the 101 / 405 interchange, which would total $240 million. But the good news is that the revenue from charges for these express lanes appears to be just about enough to pay off the $418 million in bonds that would be required for the whole project.
In short, relief for Valley commuters is in sight--if we can persuade Caltrans and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to implement innovative approaches like express lanes on these congested freeways.
