In my last post on congestion charging, I picked SR 167 to make a point, which was unfortunate. I was not writing about HOT lanes, which toll only a single lane and are about to actually be installed on 167. I was referring, instead, to all-lanes congestion pricing. Many people took that the wrong way, and I’m sorry.
Anyway, Mike at Carless in Seattle has done a great piece of research about who actually uses HOT lanes in California. As it turns out, poorer people are almost as likely to value their time, and cough up the dough. It certainly challenged my assumptions.
I hope you didn’t take my parenthetical the wrong way. I was just confused. I appreciate the clarification.
You are spot-on that congestion pricing across all lanes requires more choices, and SR-167 doesn’t have them.
Frankly, one of the things that does worry me with HOT lanes is, if the price is set too low, it could negatively impact transit speeds.
SR-167 will be an interesting experiment.
From what I understand, transit will not be able to use the HOT lanes in parts of SR-167, because it will not be able to cross the double-white lines in time to make stops.