Posted on 12/07/2017 3:11:40 AM PST by markomalley
Outraged Washington, D.C.-area commuters and politicians took to social media Tuesday to blast a new tolling scheme on a busy interstate heading from Virginia into the nation’s capital, as fees along the route peaked to an eye-popping $40 during the morning rush hour.
The Interstate-66 tolling plan, which launched Monday, opens up express lanes on the highway in northern Virginia to single drivers, as opposed to just carpoolers. But the sticker shock prices being posted on electronic signs along the roadway led some commuters and residents to give the roadway a new nickname.
“This is #highwayrobbery. People are just trying to get to work. What happened to a government FOR THE PEOPLE. I'm appalled,” one user wrote on Twitter.
“Just go ahead & change its name to I-$66," said another.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I-66 still has free lanes. The HOT lanes are separate. It is just during rush hour the free lanes are basically a parking lot, but that has been the case for many years.
Reducing Fedzilla to its CONSTITUTIONAL size, scope, power, and cost would also eliminate traffic congestion at “rush” “hour”. Whole agencies could be eliminated, to the betterment of the government and of We the People.
a parking lot...yes...
that’s why I try to get into DC earlier...I drive overnight...
So, what happens when you get on the road and it says the toll is $5, (which is still insane IMO), then by the time you turn off, the toll has risen to $40 or more? Do you get hit with the huge toll or what you entered under? (as if I didn’t know)
Yes; the toll is collected electronically as you drive underneath several gantries that are loaded with electronic equipment, including cameras that snap your car’s picture. If you don’t have an “E-Z Pass” toll transponder affixed to the inside of your windshield, the state will send you a bill which includes roughly a $12 penalty plus the toll.
I think that if people here in northern Virginia had known prior to the November election what Terry McAwful had in store for us, they would have never voted out the GOP members of the House of Delegates.
Not so. All of I-66 inside the Beltway now converts to toll/HOV during each 4-hour rush hour period.
I should have prefaced my reply by writing about being outside the Beltway. Inside has been HOV for years if I remember, but I almost never used it so I may be wrong.
I-66 outside the Beltway is still free, but is planned for toll/HOV conversion in a couple of years. You might be thinking of I-495 in Virginia, which has parallel toll/HOV and free lanes.
My starting point is DC area traffic. The word "utopia" has no place in the discussion. Neither does the word "solutions." Traffic here is miserable, and it is only going to get worse. We need to be talking about mitigation and adaptation, and the primary adaptation will be people living closer to their jobs.
This is already happening via gentrification and the development of suburban job centers in the emerging edge cities. $5,000 apartments on the orange line corridor should be a clue. That's far too expensive for most folks -- but really, does it suggest to you that we need more affordable housing 30 miles out so that even more middle income people can spend four to six hours a day in their cars? Or does it suggest that we need to build a lot more functional equivalents of the orange line corridor, and that there is substantial pent-up consumer demand for closer-in living?
Some people will opt for cars and long commutes. Their choice. Fine with me. But as the sprawl and congestion spiral down to the seventh circle of hell, it makes sense to me to start building off ramps.
DC is full of extraordinary neighborhood renaissance stories. A common denominator is that these areas are being rebuilt for mixed use and intermodal transportation options. DC government now understands that the more people who can be enticed out of their cars, the better. And that means building neighborhoods that are walkable and bikeable, with a mix of jobs, residential, and retail, with good public transit, and with amenities to which people would rather walk than drive. Check out the waterfront, Nats Park and M St. SE, H Street NE, U Street, Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Bethesda, Del Ray, Old Town Alexandria, the Buzzard Point redevelopment (in a very early stage), etc., etc., etc. It's happening just about anywhere you look in the central core.
The big question is whether the emerging edge cities will look ahead and build some of this stuff in while it can be done relatively easily. I use Tyson's Corner as a great negative example. I believe Tyson's is still Virginia's largest office center. Professor Wikipedia says it's the 12th largest employment center in the U.S. Its daytime population is over 100,000 -- and 97 percent of them drive to work.
When you stop to think about it, that's insane. Tyson's is not the backside of the moon. It was originally nothing more than a crossroads on the border of McLean and Vienna. It became a strategic crossroad when the beltway was planned, and the rest is history. But there it sits: a massive office and retail complex in the middle of McLean and Vienna with Annandale, Falls Church, Arlington, and Fairfax not far away.
Draw a line one mile outside the boundary (a walking commute) and another five miles out (an easy bike commute), and you have an enormous stock of attractive middle and upper middle class housing. But Tyson's is so moated by expressways, and so pedestrian unfriendly within its footprint, that virtually no one finds it viable to do anything other than drive. Can you spell "bad planning?"
Fairfax County is now planning to "urbanize" Tysons, building around the four new Silver Line stops. In 20 years, Tyson's may be semi-habitable. The humanization of Crystal City and the success of the Ballston-Clarendon corridor are examples to keep in mind. But it will be a long, slow process. It would have been better to build initially with a more balanced plan. Which brings me back to the decisions that the emerging edge cities are making today.
The automobile commute works well in smaller cities. No disagreement there. But when congestion reaches the choking point, the idea that you can live 30 miles from your job and expect government to build you an uncongested expressway to work is no longer viable. The DC-Baltimore-et.al Combined Statistical Area -- which is what you have to look at in thinking about transportation -- is now the fourth largest in the country, behind New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. We have almost 10 million people. We're bigger than Dallas, Houston, Philly, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, etc.
Old ideas die hard, and a lot of people remember DC as the sleepy semi-southern town of their youth, now starting to grow up. That's long gone. We ain't playing the same game as Des Moines, Omaha, and Indianapolis. But I would suggest to Des Moines, Omaha, Indianapolis, and their peers that they take a good look at what happens if and when they get big -- and do some smart planning to preserve or create walkable, bikeable, closer-in neighborhoods for people who will very likely prefer them anyhow. It really is liberating not to live your life around a commute. Those who want to drive can still drive. And their commutes will be improved if we can get a lot of the people in the center city and inner ring suburbs out of their cars.
Again, I live in a neighborhood where over 50 percent of people do not drive to work. We have many job centers around the metro area where this pattern could be established if we did some reasonable planning to accommodate it. At a minimum, the exurban car lobby should not be allowed to smash these areas by driving poorly planned roads through them without adequate mitigation (e.g., tree buffers, sound walls, bike baths, plentiful crossing points so neighborhoods are not irreparably splintered, etc.).
A hundred years ago, DC was ringed by trolley line suburbs, the remnants of which still exist in scattered, and often very charming, historic districts in our suburban towns. That's probably a better model for the future than the impossible dream of building more expressways into the core.
I thought the top four wealthiest counties were in the DC suburbs? These tolls are simply a reflection of the people's ability to pay.
If the "ordinary" people are complaining that they can't afford the good lanes, then they should take a look around them for the source of the problem.
-PJ
I gather that if I stay in the regular lanes and avoid the express lanes, nothing has changed.
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The number of lanes on Route 66 between the 495 beltway and DC remains the same - 2 lanes eastbound and 2 lanes westbound. No new lanes were constructed.
During the scheduled hours there are no free lanes, as they temporarily become “express” lanes with toll for solo drivers.
Simultaneously they are designated HOV-2 for which you will need an E-Z Pass “Flex” device set to HOV mode to travel toll free. This will change to HOV-3 in 2022.
The applicable hours and direction are as follows: Monday through Friday - 5:30 to 9:30 a.m. Eastbound, and 3:00 to 7:00 p.m. Westbound. The lanes are free with no tolling or HOV requirements at all other times.
http://www.66expresslanes.org/
It is interesting that you brought up Omaha.
From that area. Have seen it grown. Honestly, the amount of money sloshing around Omaha is rather staggering.
They (the city government) spent a lot of money getting public transportation into the city center.
Problem is that really didn’t solve much. The buses take a LONG time to get anywhere, and with many living in say Elkhorn or Valley now, people would have to drive into Omaha, park, get on a bus, and probably take multiple buses, just to get to their jobs. A few companies championed it, but then stopped when a hour commute became a two plus hour ordeal just trying to get to work.
If you lived in just the right spot (and some of my family does) and work in just the right spot, it not only difficult to get to work, the employer will not accept the time it takes for the workers to get there. “The bus was late” is not an acceptable excuse (or has never been for me).
Not to mention the danger associated with public transportation. Here (in Eastern Iowa) a local teen beat up a bus driver who demanded he pay the fare.
For some, such things work. I have used the E trains in Chicago quite a bit when downtown. When I lived there? Well, I couldn’t get from where I lived to work without going downtown first, and then getting another train to take me out. I could drive it in 25 minutes which would have taken an hour or more using public transportation
Yes, you are right about 66. It’s 495 where i have a choice.
EZ Pass is basically an RFID system.
They have fixed RFID detectors at the "toll gates" but they also make portable ones that can be used by the police.
I live in a neighborhood where 100% of people drive to work. I drive 50k miles a year, so that should give you an idea. Lots of people walk, about 50% with their dogs. I can walk 2 miles round trip and see perhaps 3 cars drive by (mostly people I know). Guy who works off and on for me is open carry, many others carry concealed.
As for sound walls, from Nov through Feb is quiet season from the last cricket to the first spring peeper or tree frog. During the day there are mostly just birds (native, not imported crap). At night mostly nothing, there will be zero sound a lot of the time. Some people freak out.
“are motorcycles free as well? in WA they are able to use toll lanes gratis.”
Hey, I didn’t know that. Maybe I’ll ride one of my eastern WA dirt bikes over to your side of the state.
I rode a bike to work for years. My commute was under two miles. This is typical; the average bike commute is under seven miles, and a lot are much shorter than that.
The long distance spandex warriors are numerically insignificant. From a planning standpoint, they are an indicator species. Their presence means that they have a viable migration corridor, i.e. enough decent biking infrastructure that they can actually find a practicable route. Around here, most of this would probably consist of quiet, bike friendly streets in residential neighborhoods, supplemented by a few of the trails that go somewhere useful (as opposed to pleasant recreational rides along the streams and in the parks). When you see the long distance guys on a crowded road where they clearly don't belong, it's usually because there's a gap in the good bike route, and they're flushed onto busy streets until they can dive back into cover.
IOW, when you see the spandex warriors on commuter roads, don't rail at the stupidity of the riders. Consider instead what their presence is telling you. Look at a bike map and see where the gaps are. A lot of the action in DC bike circles focuses on bridging the gaps so you can move easily from neighborhood to neighborhood without killing yourself trying to get across an arterial road.
Don't think of bike commuters as long distance performance artists. Most of them are just moving around their own neighborhoods. A very high percentage of trips by car are under five miles as well. That's an opportunity to reduce congestion, if we can get a reasonable percentage into walking or biking. With good design, biking infrastructure becomes a neighborhood amenity that attracts active young people.
In many areas, you are spot on.
I live in a small town 35 miles from work. Most of it is open interstate. Many of my neighbors work for a big green tractor maker, and drive similar amounts.
The area I live in (Quad Cities, on the border of Iowa and Illinois), is small to medium sized cities with a lot of small towns and rural areas. There is some public transportation but not much.
My family near Omaha is another situation. Growing rapidly, no one in the outer ring of suburbs has had any thought to such things. Or rather, ten years ago they had a ten mile or more gap between Omaha and themselves, so it wasn’t an issue. And Nebraskans really don’t like to give up their cars. There are some decent bikeways there (Better than Davenport, Iowa, who put a bike lane on a four lane street with a speed limit of 40 mph), but again they are in the center of town, and do not extend to far. In fact many of the neighborhoods fight it.
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