Posted on 03/16/2019 10:51:28 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
WASHINGTON — Efforts to alleviate traffic for tens of thousands of D.C.-area commuters were approved Wednesday, but not before Maryland attempted to eliminate a provision pushing for uniform tolling practices across the region’s express lanes.
The resolution adopted by the region’s Transportation Planning Board is the first concrete action toward new goals developed over the last two years to reduce traffic jams and get people from home to work or other activities faster and with more efficiency.
“The first step, a concrete effort, toward the projects, programs and policies this region [will] fund and implement in the coming years,” said TPB Chairman and D.C. Council member Charles Allen.
The Maryland tolling amendment was rejected by on a 16-7 vote. It attempted to remove language calling for toll lanes like the ones Maryland is planning around the Capital Beltway and Interstate 270 to provide free access for carpools and buses. It also would have removed language calling for the same rules to apply for “express lanes” in both Maryland and Virginia and instead asked simply for a study of tolling operations elsewhere.
Maryland has not committed to matching the tolling rules in place in the 95 and 495 Express Lanes in Virginia, where users with at least three people in the car and an E-ZPass Flex in HOV mode travel free no matter how high the variable toll price goes.
The regional resolution approved Wednesday calls on transportation agencies to develop a consistent tolling policy for express lanes that exempt HOVs from tolls “to prioritize moving more people rather than more vehicles on our roadways.”
“The TPB, as a body, is asking for the states to do something that is clear and is consistent across the region,” DDOT Chief Project Delivery Officer Sam Zimbabwe said.
(Excerpt) Read more at wtop.com ...
Unfortunately, traffic is worse because they didn’t build out lanes for cars, and now you are not using your bike like before.
PING.
I guess Marylanders aren’t “getting right” - our government is determined to eliminate private ownership of vehicles, and reduce us to Red Chinese serfs. In my area in NJ, you can see imported braceros riding their bikes 12 months of the year to their under-the-table jobs - like a Hispanic Beijing.
These bike lanes is an effort by the eco Nazis politicians to save the planet form fossil fueled cars and trucks. I traveled down a familiar street in my neighborhood that was just enough room for ONE car and wouldn’t you know these stupid bastards put a bike lane on that same street. Shows you the idiots and their idiotic ways
Just ban automobiles in DC. Make all the deep state commies walk to work for their final 12 years on a habitable earth.
Epa and car safety regs do a lot of that. Too expensive for serfs to have cars now. An airbag deployment will often be considered by insurance companies as a “total”.
One of the issues we have with birthrate is that many serfs (outside of urbanized yuppies) will forsake everything else - including families - to get that car. While some European mass-transit systems are held up as enviable models, too many of ours are dangerous places with roving ferals - and in my area (northeastern NJ, connected to NYC), a decaying infrastructure that is seriously impacting reliability. Many young people today are quite content to lease cars forever (paying full auto insurance forever as well) - in a state with notoriously high auto insurance. It is actually good training for the next episode for which our standard of living has visibly declined; many will be renting their living space forever as well.
I’ve seen bike lanes painted on the streets in some real sh!thole areas in Newark NJ; never any bikes, and if you rode your bike there it would be someone else’s bike within a block or two (no kidding). It is creepy, like they are feigning civility for a visiting dignitary.
Sam Zimbabwe...
Hope this is not foreshadowing for a dystopian future...
White people...on the trains...on the trains...
:-(
The second tier solution is to plan consciously to steer pedestrians and cyclists away from arterial roads and onto quiet residential streets. In many areas this already happens naturally. If there is a regular street grid, it's usually easy for a cyclist to move over a block or two and avoid the traffic. Cult re sac style development, however, often creates areas in which the side streets don't go through and everyone gets forced onto the big road to get anywhere -- which also makes the arterial road even busier than it would otherwise be. There is also often a shortage of safe crossings. Morning drive time radio is a steady litany of pedestrian struck by car reports. There are several nearly every week. This is the consequence of bad road design. Planners should look carefully at roads that create chokepoints and barriers. Solve those, and a lot of the problem would disappear.
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