Free Republic

Imagine driving along a four-lane elevated causeway above the brackish San Pablo Bay, shaving more than an hour off the normal Highway 37 commute. Transportation planners have for years envisioned remaking the 20-mile route from Novato to Vallejo into the North Bay’s most important east-west corridor. Now, they are ready to act. Officials in Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Solano counties have been meeting for several years, pondering solutions to Highway 37’s notorious bottlenecks, where 45,000 cars per day stretch the normal 20-minute commute to as much as 100 minutes. They have also acknowledged that traffic improvements will be irrelevant without...

Professor of Finance for the College of Staten Island and Research Fellow at The University Transportation Research Center Johnathan Peters says if Connecticut lawmakers are looking to raise revenue for transportation, they might be better off looking somewhere else besides highway tolls. “Tolls, generally, are expensive to collect,” Peters said in an interview. “It’s not free. There’s a lot of technology and a lot of equipment, and that equipment will have to be maintained and replaced over time.” Peters -- whose area of expertise and study involves regional planning and road and mass transit financing -- says tolls are more...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – After just two hours of public testimony, a committee looking for solutions to Ohio’s highway funding gap found consensus on just one potential revenue source: raising the Ohio gas tax. The panel didn’t get to the level of detail Wednesday afternoon of specifying how much the tax increase should be. The Governor’s Advisory Committee on Transportation Infrastructure otherwise didn’t find agreement on other ways to raise money for Ohio’s road system, but additional sources of revenue could be added to a report being compiled on the group’s work. Other ideas discussed included indexing the gas tax to...

HARRISBURG, PA (JAN. 2, 2019) — The PA Turnpike Commission (PTC) today reminded customers that, beginning 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 6, tolls will reflect a six-percent increase for cash, E-ZPass and PA Turnpike TOLL BY PLATE users. The increase, approved by commissioners last July, is needed to meet the PTC’s dual funding obligation to improve its toll-road system and support mass-transit improvements across the Commonwealth. As a result, the most-common toll for a passenger vehicle will increase a dime for E-ZPass customers from $1.30 to $1.40 and 20 cents for cash customers from $2.10 to $2.30. The toll increase —...

Commuters who live in western Prince William and Fauquier counties can leave the driving to someone else come Dec. 17 when a new bus begins round-trip service from Haymarket to Arlington. The “OmniRide Haymarket Express” will make four trips in the morning and four return trips in the afternoon and early evening. It will run along I-66 between Haymarket and the Rosslyn Metro station. The trips will originate from the new park-and-ride lot on the northeast corner of U.S. 15 and Interstate 66. The Monday-through Friday service is meant to give workers an alternative to traveling by car. It’s the...

When the 66 Express Lanes opened a year ago, officials promised the tolls would mean a smoother ride on the interstate, a major east-west thoroughfare from Northern Virginia into the District that is infamous for its headache-inducing congestion. The state’s promise — less congestion and faster travel times during rush hour — has been fulfilled for many commuters able to pay or carpool, but the new toll system has had an adverse effect for many of the remaining road users. For some commuters, the rush-hour period has simply shifted later — outside the toll hours — and dumped them onto...

The search continued Friday for the gunman who shot another man at close range in the pedestrian tunnel between two busy Loop subway stations, according to Chicago police. A 27 year-old-man was shot in the left hip Thursday evening. Police said he likely knew the gunman and was not cooperating with investigators. The shooting happened just after 5 p.m. near the Jackson stop on the Blue and Red lines. CTA surveillance video appeared to show a man standing in the tunnel that connects the two lines when the shooter walked up and fired twice, hitting him once, police said. Police...

WINCHESTER — The Frederick County Transportation Committee on Monday expressed concerns that the county may not get the Interstate 81 improvements it needs to reduce traffic congestion and accidents. The Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment, the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Department of Rail and Public Transportation are studying the entire length of the I-81 corridor in the Virginia, as directed by the General Assembly, to identify changes that will reduce traffic backups and crashes as well as find the funding to make those changes. The I-81 study team identified 105 projects — valued at $4.25 billion —...

By Bruce DePuyt — When Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. (R) announced a major plan to widen three Maryland roadways last year, even transportation insiders were caught off-guard. “I was surprised by it, but I rejoiced at it,” said John B. Townsend II, AAA mid-Atlantic’s manager of public and government affairs. “As much as people are loath to admit it, the congestion in Maryland has limited economic development in the state. And [it has] impacted the quality of life because of the amount of hours — more than 80 hours a year [on average] — we spend being stuck in...

More than 300 bridges in Connecticut — carrying 4.3 million vehicles daily — are considered structurally deficient. Highways in the Bridgeport-Stamford area are so congested motorists waste 49 hours a year in bumper-to-bumper traffic. And 62 percent of Connecticut’s major roads are in such poor condition they cost motorists $681 annually in vehicle repairs, according to TRIP, a national transportation think tank. Given those challenges, the three men seeking to replace Gov. Dannel P. Malloy could be making transportation the centerpiece of their campaigns. But instead, these candidates for governor are offering mostly modest plans to fix the state’s infrastructure...

Maryland voters narrowly oppose adding express toll lanes to widen three of the state’s most congested highways, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll finds, highlighting public skepticism about one of Gov. Larry Hogan’s signature transportation plans. The centerpiece of the Republican governor’s proposal — a $9 billion project to add four lanes apiece to the Capital Beltway, Interstate 270 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway — is even opposed by voters in the Washington suburbs, whom the plan is supposed to help. More than half of voters in the D.C. suburbs prefer to invest in public transit rather than building more roads....

In life, some things are unavoidable: death, taxes — and if you live in South Florida — tolls. Coughing up money to drive on the highways add to the cost of living in South Florida. Drivers in Miami-Dade and Broward spent more than a half billion dollars in tolls fees in the last year. Consider: A daily trip from Kendall to downtown Miami costs over $4 roundtrip by Sunpass, or about $1,000 a year for a five-day a week, 50-week commuter. For those who haven’t signed up for Sunpass, the toll-by-plate rate of almost $8 per day amounts to $2,000...

The crack discovered Tuesday in a steel beam that supports the roof garden of the new, $2.2 billion Transbay Transit Center — forcing the terminal’s abrupt closure just as rush-hour was getting going — is the latest headache for the 2 1/2 block long transit hub.

You can sum up the Greensboro area’s biggest transportation news in several generations with two words: Urban Loop. Set for completion by 2022 — when the last of the Greensboro Urban Loop’s remaining two legs are finished — the project’s potential impact is hard to overstate. It will mark the end for a legacy of planning, debate, study and construction that harkens back to the late 1940s. “The Urban Loop is probably a once-in-a-lifetime project,” says Adam Fischer, director of the Greensboro Department of Transportation. “I don’t see any project ahead that’s quite on that scale.” Spanning 44 miles when...

For too long the state has held our roads and bridges hostage while increasing spending on other priorities like Medicaid expansion, hoping we taxpayers get so frustrated by traffic we’ll agree to a tax increase. Well, this fall voters will have a choice. As the Denver Chamber of Commerce pimps a 21% state sales tax increase for transit, roads and a slush fund for cities, there will be an alternative as our Fix Our Damn Roads initiative will also be on the ballot. It will force the state to use its large surplus funds and re-prioritize less than 2 percent...

Marylanders spend more time commuting to work than the residents of every other state, apart from New York. The time spent stuck in I-270 or Beltway traffic is maddeningly frustrating. Congestion results in less time spent with families and discourages workers from taking jobs involving longer commutes. Economists estimate that congestion costs run into the billions. The statewide cost of congestion based on auto delay, truck delay and wasted fuel and emissions was estimated at $2 billion in 2015. This is an increase of 22% from the $1.7 billion estimated cost for congestion in 2013. As serious a problem as...

Once again, the oh-so progressive, oh-so enlightened Seattle City Council is showing the rest of the country what not to do. The idealistic leftists who control the Council are wasting millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars in failed attempts to solve problems the Council members created. All this is turning Seattle into the poster city for the failure of Big Government. The city best known for fish markets, coffee stores, rain and flannel-wearing musicians is now becoming legendary for its incompetent leadership and its financial boondoggles. The latest example of Seattle senselessness is the Council’s costly and deeply flawed efforts to...

ne city project has gone further off the rails. The new Seattle streetcars may not fit on the city’s existing rail lines. That heavy fact is among a handful of details from independent auditor KPMG. Its initial report on the Seattle streetcar system has raised more questions than answers. Mayor Jenny Durkan halted all construction on the City Center Connector Project in March after it became apparent that costs were over-budget by $23 million. The project aims to connect separate streetcar lines in South Lake Union and First Hill with a new line through the downtown core. But the streetcars...

Maryland’s $9 billion plan to expand the Beltway and Interstate 270 is among the nation’s biggest boondoggles, a public-interest advocacy group said Tuesday in a new report. The report — issued by U.S. PIRG Education Fund and Frontier Group — highlights nine highway projects, including Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s plan to widen certain roadways using public-private partnerships and tolling to pay for them. The advocates say these projects are unwise for several reasons. They say expanding or building new highways always leads to more congestion over time through the wholly predictable phenomenon of “induced demand”: When new capacity opens up,...

Any Montgomery County voter looking for traffic relief will not get much hope from the transportation manifestos of Montgomery County’s “progressive” Democrats this primary season. Collectively, they all try to outdo each other in their opposition to anything involving spending for roads. Instead of supporting projects that will reduce travel times, they propose diverting more money to public transit. They push a strategy of “planned gridlock” that is intended to drive motorists from their cars. If alleging “planned gridlock” seems harsh, consider the Montgomery County Council legislation designed to slow traffic flow by significantly narrowing travel lane widths on some...