February 26, 2003, Wednesday

NATIONAL DESK

Planners Say Tolls Will Ease Jams in 8 Cities

By JOHN TIERNEY (NYT) 865 words

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 -- Traffic planners released a plan today that they say will guarantee commuters in eight large cities speedy drives or bus rides to work. Their vision of congestion-free lanes is familiar, but this time, the experts have an ambitious national plan and at least some influential allies.

The planners propose to keep traffic flowing by charging tolls, an idea that has traditionally been as unpopular with drivers and politicians as it is beloved by economists and engineers. This proposal, which would use part of the toll revenue to pay for bus service on the lanes, is supported by some moderate Democrats, as well as by free-market Republicans, by some environmentalists and, perhaps most significantly, by some officials of the AAA, a powerful enemy of tolls in the past.

The proposal would convert car pool lanes and build new lanes so that most freeways in each city had at least one H.O.T. lane, as engineers call it, a high-occupancy toll lane open free to buses and commuter vans and, at a price, to individual drivers.

In H.O.T. lanes, which operate successfully in Southern California, tolls are collected electronically at freeway speeds, and they increase at peak times so that the lanes do not become congested.

The co-authors of the proposal, Robert W. Poole Jr. and C. Kenneth Orski, estimate that the new lanes and interchanges would cost $44 billion, with tolls covering two-thirds of the costs and the remainder coming from local governments and federal highway and mass-transit programs.

The regions would be Atlanta, Dallas-Forth Worth, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.

''We see this as a realistic legislative proposal for Congress,'' said Mr. Orski, a former associate administrator of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration. He noted that a change in federal policy allowed mass-transit money once reserved for rail projects to be given to bus projects. But any suggestion to impose tolls on voters makes politicians uneasy.

''It's too early to weigh the prospects for this proposal,'' said Steve Hansen, a spokesman for the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. ''Toll lanes tend to draw a lot of red flags. But with today's congestion problems and the lack of adequate funds for highway and transit projects, perhaps this could be a potential part of the solution.''

The idea is gaining bipartisan support among policy experts. The proposal, published by the Reason Public Policy Institute, a libertarian group, has also been endorsed by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic group, as well as by Environmental Defense.

Michael Repogle, transportation director for the environmental group, said H.O.T. lanes would cut urban air pollution by reducing emissions from cars stuck in traffic jams and by encouraging drivers to switch to high-speed buses.

In the past, politicians have called high-speed toll lanes ''Lexus lanes'' that unfairly benefit the affluent, and AAA officials have fiercely opposed the lanes.

Former critics, including Lon Anderson, a spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, are offering favorable reviews. Mr. Anderson said tolls might be the only way to pay for the one or two new lanes needed on the congested Beltway around Washington.

''I've criticized Lexus lanes in the past,'' he said. ''But we have to consider tolls because the federal and state coffers can't pay for the new highway lanes and subway lines we'd like. We're not going to relax our opposition to tolling existing highways. But using tolls to pay for new lanes seems reasonable, especially since the tolls would also pay for new buses in these lanes.''

Shane Ham, an expert with the Progressive Policy Institute, also pointed to the buses as a selling point.

''This proposal has great political potential,'' Mr. Ham said, ''because you're not just building new lanes for drivers. You'd also get a high-speed transit system that covers an entire metropolitan region, and that could be built quickly and affordably.''

Correction: March 6, 2003, Thursday An article on Feb. 26 about a plan to set up high-speed toll lanes for cars and buses in eight cities misstated the position of the advocacy group Environmental Defense. While it praised the use of toll revenues to subsidize the high-speed bus service, it did not endorse the overall plan. The article also misspelled the surname of the group's transportation director. He is Michael Replogle, not Repogle.