The Post-Gazette reports that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) will use a $1.25 million federal grant to study whether the HOV lanes – those “high occupancy vehicle” lanes – in the center of interstates 279 and 576 to Pittsburgh’s North Hills should be reimagined.
The lanes currently operate inbound-only during morning rush hour and outbound-only during the afternoon rush. One idea is to have the HOV lanes handle two-way traffic all the time and, perhaps, charge a toll for their use.
The P-G notes how the more than six-mile stretch of HOV lanes have been historically underused, averaging only about 2,300 vehicles daily. And its automatic entrance/exist gates are best known for regularly malfunctioning, notice thereof a staple of radio and TV traffic reports.
Thirty-one years ago, in 1995, when the gates were operated manually, an operator error led to a head-on crash in which six people were killed and two were injured.
Traffic follies and tragedies aside, some observers have posited that the HOV lanes would be the perfect place to extend Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) light-rail system.
But as transit scholar Randal O’Toole long has documented, “Rail advocates don’t like to admit it but buses can carry more people, more comfortably and to more places, for far less money, than light rail.”
A light-rail extension to the North Hills would be a boondoggle that far exceeds the boondoggle of PRT’s North Shore Connector.
But the simple fact of the matter remains that HOV lanes, in Pittsburgh and in general, have been a bust and the butt of more than a few jokes.
As a 2022 Reason Foundation white paper noted, HOV lanes nationwide have failed to reduce traffic congestion or emissions, two of the usual “benefits” touted by proponents.
And carpooling “plummeted from 19.7 percent of commuters nationwide in 1980 to only 8.9 percent in 2019,” Reason researchers found.
Oh, and there’s this: With enforcement of the general “two-or-more-occupants” rule difficult – if not often nonexistent – solo drivers use HOV lanes with impunity, Reason concluded.
So, what’s to be done with these HOV lanes?
Given that HOV lanes have failed to stimulate carpooling or reduce congestion and emissions, Reason notes that “States are increasingly converting the lanes to high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, where pricing keeps traffic flowing smoothly, reducing tailpipe emissions.”
Turn over Pittsburgh’s HOV lanes to a private operator, that then becomes responsible for all their costs, from routine maintenance to upgrades, and you just might have a workable public-private partnership plan.
And with a profit-motive in play, we have just a smidgeon of a hunch that those HOV gates suddenly will be working without a glitch.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
