There’s no such thing as a free ride. Certainly not in a metroplex like Atlanta, where roadway gridlock is a constant in our lives.
It’s equally certain that the solutions won’t be free, or even cheap. Doing nothing will cost at least as much, and likely even more.
Which brings us up to, traffic permitting, the new I-85 experiment in HOT lanes. High-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, as they’re known, extract driver fees from California to Florida.
HOTs are billed as a next-gen improvement to free-to-all HOV lanes. The thinking goes that setting a price on the option to speed past slower traffic in regular lanes would provide more-reliable trip times — at least for those willing to pay or ride three to a vehicle.
Georgia officials activated the I-85 HOT lanes this month, powering up toll card sniffers and stationing state troopers on the roadside to pounce on scofflaws.
Charging up to 90 cents a mile to evade congestion on an often-crowded highway here was widely, if implicitly, considered to be in line with the currently popular taxation strategy of funding public works through user fees, rather than hiking more broadly applied fuel or other taxes.
Want a speedier ride? Pay for it as you need it. That seemed more politically palatable than raising taxes for all to add new lanes to increase capacity.
Motorists didn’t see it that way. The HOT lanes got an icy reception from the start as drivers voted with their steering wheels. The toll lanes were even more congestion-free than projected because drivers largely avoided them in favor of the toll-free lanes.
It took just three days for Gov. Nathan Deal to switch on the caution light and announce that he was lowering tolls — for now — by nearly 45 percent. His action is intended to both dial back driver ire and, hopefully, stimulate greater use of the HOT lanes.
Motorist anger at charging new tolls to use existing asphalt that taxpayers had already paid for once is understandable and justified.
That’s not to say that HOT lanes are a bad concept that shouldn’t be expanded further in Georgia. Toll lanes, and even dedicated all-toll roads, have their place. Many other cities and states have used them to great advantage.
With proper planning and sound thinking, we should too. We’d expect trucking firms, for example, that move traffic through Georgia by the ton would be happy to pay a sizable toll to access a far-OTP beltway and escape Atlanta’s traffic crawl.
Yet, Gov. Deal is right in his distaste for converting existing HOV lanes to HOT lanes. Taxpayers shouldn’t be hit twice for the expense of evading congestion on roads they’ve already paid to build.
That said, with $60 million already sunk into the I-85 project, we believe Deal should have waited longer before cutting tolls and pushing for other changes to ease motorist sticker shock. Three days is nowhere near enough time for drivers to get over initial anger at tolls or get used to the new system.
Early anger would likely have been followed by acceptance, however grudging. It would have been better to have given the HOT lanes at least a month or, better yet, a full 90 days before acting to slash tolls.
If any immediate action was necessary, it might have been an enhanced effort to educate drivers about the HOT lane concept, its benefits and growing popularity nationwide.
Roadway tie-ups cost us each and all a sizable sum in wasted fuel, lost time and lessened efficiency in our everyday lives. It’s tempting to call that a hidden tax. In reality, it’s the opposite. Congestion’s tax stands out on household budgets and corporate balance sheets alike.
Our quality of life and even our future prosperity will depend heavily on finding solutions to the Atlanta region’s epic traffic woes.
Properly executed toll lanes and roads can be an important part of metro Atlanta’s multimodal transportation plan, but only where fees support new lanes that truly add capacity.
That’s the real lesson from the Atlanta HOT lane rebellion.
Andre Jackson, for the Editorial Board
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