Coalition for Effective Transportation Alternatives

CETA
728 N. 148th
Shoreline, WA
98133
206 368-0814

TESTIMONY FROM JOHN NILES FOR TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION OPEN HOUSE ON AN HOV/HOT PROPOSAL

KENT, WASHINGTON --- JANUARY 9, 2003

Thank you for holding this Open House and listening session. My name is John Niles and I am a Seattle-based public policy consultant focused on improving the societal benefits from investments in telecommunications and transportation networks, as well as a WSDOT customer. I'm not representing any group tonight.

I do commend and support the Transportation Department's present proposal to implement a two-year pilot program to test changes in Eastside HOV lanes. I support in particular the planned project to demonstrate to the public the benefits of charging tolls for new categories of vehicles on managed HOT lanes, such as trucks and solo car drivers with arrival deadlines and a willingness to pay a value-based fee to meet a time sensitive arrival deadline. This is an important step in the development of the region's world class rapid bus, high-capacity mass transit system that will be emerging in the years ahead. You will of course be giving BRT priority access to those HOT lanes.

I also support the positive viewpoints on HOT lanes submitted to WSDOT by my friends and colleagues Don Padelford of Citizens for Mobility and Bruce Agnew of the Cascadia Project at Discovery Institute. They have both studied the HOT lane concept carefully and have helped to convince me that now would be a good time to move forward with a trial. In the same way I also support the forthcoming, pricing experiment of the Puget Sound Regional Council that will reward a test cadre of car drivers who stay out of congestion with changed mobility behavior.

Even in the age of high speed telecommunications, public roads become more important day by day. Travel volumes show that. The inherent flexibility, convenience, and reach provided by small and HOV vehicle mobility trumps the geographically limited, inflexible, sometimes dangerous, and always expensive-per-new-user fixed guideway technologies that inevitably pick up a very small percentage of travel demand. Your HOT proposal clearly addresses a larger share of the travel market than any rail projects in your field of vision.

Public roads with limited funding need to be managed for a maximum value flow of people and goods. The highest priority for improving that flow should of course be given to the highest volume roads, the Interstates and limited access state highways, with arterials following shortly. WSDOT knows what needs to be done and is doing it more and more: For example, continuing the refinement of incident response systems that quickly clear away flow impediments like accidents and breakdowns. Enhancing traveler information systems that warn discretionary users to stay off when the flow is impeded. Optimizing ongoing traffic flows with signals, such as ramp meters and electronic signs that regulate speed and warn drivers of problems ahead. Priority in all these techniques is afforded to public transit road vehicles that when full of people yield a people carrying capacity that exceeds the once well-used inter-urban trolleys that fell into disuse with the rise of motor vehicles that go everywhere. And pricing that reflects the time and location of vehicles within the public road network is an important new flow management tool, so please get cracking!

Number one, the general public and their elected leaders talk as though they are grossly uninformed about the functions of roads beyond the commonplace of getting people to work and school in private vehicles. Not in the front of the public's mind are the role of roads in providing right of way for one of the most effective regional mass transit systems in America, for supporting emergency services and homeland defense, and in supporting the daily restocking of every single item on every single shelf of every single retail store in this region. I urge Commission members to speak out on the basic purposes of roads beyond commuting trips and defend them from voices that seem to portray roads as an environmental evil.

Number two, there is little public appreciation for how well the roads of this region function on a daily basis in the most fundamental sense of making the economy work. Problems of congestion are the problems of success, and should be regarded as problems on the margin, not as signs that roads are a failed technology. If the $15 per rider subsidized Sounder commuter train were jammed to the walls THAT would be celebrated as a success! The volumes of people, goods, and vehicles moved every day on WSDOT roads are remarkable, despite growing congestion. Could we use more capacity? Sure. And could flow management be improved? Absolutely. But every day people and goods get to their destinations, all the rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.

Back to the HOT topic: Yes, there is and will be pressure on motorists and truck drivers to leave earlier or stay later to avoid the road congestion that marks the success of our society as travel demand is fulfilled. Peak spreading is an important way of accomodating daily demand and we should celebrate it, not bemoan it. Of course Boeing and Safeway should move their product in the darkness before the dawn. Pricing and traveler information systems should motivate peak spreading. Again, I urge the Commission and the Department to speak out.

I should add that the available quantification of our road congestion problems is not up to what it should be, a moving target for improvement. However, the larger problem is in not yet conveying to the public a sense of what professionals at the University of Washington and WSDOT are routinely measuring about the vast traffic flows in this region.

Lastly, the obvious technology-driven future under existing computing and communications trends is toward road management based primarily on vehicle capabilities, like GPS and telematics, and not roadside infrastructure capabilities like sensors built into the pavement and video cameras. The PSRC regionwide Road Pricing Pilot Project is a harbinger of this path. Over time, a decade or two ahead of now, and well before the completion of Link Light Rail Modified Phase 1b, the super computer in every car, bus, and truck is going to know at all times where the vehicle is on the road network with one inch precision, and what the state of congestion is. The little but powerful computer will be capable of reporting the vehicle's location, speed, and time of day for flow management purposes, as well as for safety, vehicle maintenance, driver information, and other purposes.

Government in our wonderfully freedom-preserving society won't be able to compel vehicle owners to make these capabilities a part of region wide, congestion-sensitive road pricing. However, government bodies like this Commission using results from the PSRC pilot project could certainly devise incentives to cause road users over time to cooperate with a revenue-neutral shift in transportation funding that is more time and location and vehicle load based, and less fuel-consumption based.

Washington State could provide leadership through public policy steps to motivate this shift by beginning work now on envisioning and specifying a technological capability that supports an entirely better revenue raising and road capacity management system than the one we have now. Until we grasp this opportunity and get the technological resources of this region working on it, those resources will be dissipated by our technical minds spending too much time fine-tuning in-car computing telematics to provide new forms of entertainment and semi-productive diversion for drivers who are stuck in congested traffic flow.

Thank you very much for this opportunity to comment on the Commission's transportation leadership. Keep up the good work.