Houston Chronicle Article on Hybrids

quote:

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Originally posted by NoSUV
[br]Sponge, that's exactly what happens now - at least with the evening commute. Starting about 5:45 pm, cars and trucks pull off to the shoulder at the start of 395 HOV and put on their flashers. About 10 minutes later, cars with no one in front of them go about 15 mph to see if they can still be legal and hit the gas at exactly 6 pm.

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And I applaud heartily when I see the cops writing tickets to those schmucks, as I did last Friday. Damn dangerous of them, especially the way they pull out into traffic without looking. Too bad they can't just do away with the shoulders in that area so that there would be nowhere for people to stop.

As for the "15 mph at 5:55 PM" crowd, I don't see the point of doing that. Practically speaking, if it's within 5 minutes of the end of HOV most cops will give any driver the benefit of the doubt given how no two clocks ever agree--similar to how most cops will acknowledge that 5 mph over the speed limit is almost never grounds for a ticket because of the possibility of speedometer error. (Now, I know someone will say that people would just deliberately set their clocks ahead. Of course some people will, but that's not the point. The point is that to most cops it wouldn't be worth the time to argue the point.)

http://www.fta.dot.gov/library/planning/RETK/retk.html

A Report by the CHESAPEAKE BAY FOUNDATION





III. Transit: The forgotten HOV


RECOMMENDATION 1: In congested urban areas, newly constructed
roadway lanes should be primarily or exclusively for public
transit.


Public transit buses are the workhorses of many urban freeway HOV
lanes, and would do even more if buses received higher priority. As
shown by Table 1, inside back cover, [Pratt, 1991 ] even on HOV
lanes that admit carpools, more than a third of the travelers are
riding by bus, and on some routes they outnumber those in carpools
and vanpools. Clearly, many HOV lanes are high performers only
because of their usefulness to transit.

The most impressive performance is on bus only lanes. The nation's
(and possibly the world's) best "people-carrying" road lane is New
Jersey's Route 495, where a morning bus-only lane carries more than
20,000 people an hour into the Lincoln Tunnel. The lane serves 30
percent of all trans-Hudson River commuters, more than the combined
total of all 12 general purpose lanes next to it [Home and Quelch].
Also notable is the Ottawa Carleton area's network of transitways,
which help OC Transpo carry 30 percent of all vehicle-based travel
and 70 percent of peak hour trips to downtown [Bonsall].

Many more bus passengers are carried on exclusive bus lanes that
are located on surface streets and are too numerous to list. Bus-
only lanes can be found in every major city and in many smaller
cities.

An advantage of buses over carpools is that they require much less
road space per passenger [Vuchic et al.]. At freeway speeds, a full
bus can carry as many people as a lane of carpools up to a mile
long. Buses are rarely so numerous as to cause a traffic Jam, a
fact that helps protect the time savings of riding in a bus-only
lane. Traffic jams are caused mostly by automobiles, which, even
when full, require a lot more road space per passenger, and thus
slow one another down.

Any discussion of HOV lanes should begin with the question, "What
is best for transit?" A common argument in favor of HOV lanes and
other facilities is that they promote use of buses. That is not
always true. Certainly preferred access for buses can speed
schedules, use equipment and drivers more efficiently, and improve
reliability and safety. But these benefits are lessened or lost
when a bus-only lane is opened to other traffic. A leading textbook
on transit facilities observes that allowing other vehicles on bus
lanes "is always harmful to transit: buses can only lose from it,
while all the benefits are accrued by their competitors, private
autos" [Vuchic, 1981, p. 260]. Yet a survey of past evaluations of
HOV lanes found in them almost no discussion of bus service
productivity, schedule adherence, or safety [Turnbull, 1991, p.
44].

Ongoing pressure to open bus lanes to carpools could diminish or
eliminate the lanes' relative advantages for buses. Bus-only lanes
provide time and/or service improvements to riders. When an attempt
is made to transfer these benefits to carpools by opening the bus
lane to them, the bus riders' advantages are lost. When the El
Monte and Shirley Highway busways were opened to carpools, many of
the resulting carpoolers were former bus riders. Automobile trips
increased as transit ridership stagnated. The same sequence
occurred when carpool lanes began to compete with the bus lanes on
the east

6 ReThinking HOV





approach to the San Francisco-Oakland Bay
Bridge [Beroldo].

The point is that bus service, exclusively, is the right choice IF one really wants to solve the problem. And I mean exclusively, so NO SUV is on the regular lanes in his hybrid. The bus is the only vehicle allowed. Now if New Jersey can make this thing work, why can't Washington DC? I mean, no disrespect, but we at least 20 IQ points higher than them, lol. Forget the HOT lanes, restore it to a Bus only lane, and every fifteen minutes the Bus stops at L'Enfant, Union Station, Metro Centre and Foggy Bottom. Every twenty minutes, a different bus goes for military units, Fort Belvoir, Pentagon, and Navy Yard. Given a regular reliable bus system, and most importantly, a reliable way home, why would we need our cars? Now surely there would be tweaking for not so busy times between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm, but there is NO reason this can not be done.

So yeah, those who like their own cars don't like the system. Deal with it. You either have this or HOT, and I strongly suggest this is the better alternative...

quote:

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Originally posted by CallmeMrSlug
[br]The point is that bus service, exclusively, is the right choice IF one really wants to solve the problem. And I mean exclusively, so NO SUV is on the regular lanes in his hybrid. The bus is the only vehicle allowed.

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Good points. However, I still think we need to make a better incentive to consumers as well as the auto industry that we need to have ALL vehicles become hybrids to reduce consumption and emissions. Unfortunately, the best way to do that is through allow hybrids in the "busses only" express lanes.

Maybe the bus system would work so well that the main lines would become bearable. Or, maybe, geez I hate to think it, but since we are facing this crisis, they extend the exemption for hybrids...