Man has no nobler function than to defend the truth.
Ruth McKenney
The ICC/MD200: An Interesting Toll Concept
I've been used to long commutes most of my adult life; an hour to 2 hours one-way has been typical. And I've had more than my fair share of congested traffic. How bad? In one case, I got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the Baltimore 695 loop; my personal physician at the time was in Towson. I showed up 15 minutes late, and he dropped me as a patient. For one job interview in Washington DC (roughly 26 miles away), I started 2 hours ahead and got caught up in standstill traffic on I-95S 5 miles from the Beltway (495) and another mile or so from Greenbelt Metro station; I showed up 30 minutes late. They still interviewed me but told my recruiter that they decided to pass, citing my tardiness. I once had a gig at Quantico (USMC headquarters), maybe an hour or so south of the Beltway off I-95; I was on 495W near Silver Spring, and traffic on the multi-lane loop was bumper to bumper at 5:45AM. (Believe me, morning rush hour is worse.)
In Houston, I had my fill of heavy traffic on Westheimer (a major road in the western section of Houston), and the Southwest Freeway. How bad was it? My S&L ATM was at an island in a small mall bordering Westheimer I used to go to; as a struggling PhD student on a limited budget, I celebrated passing my oral comprehensive exam by going to a dollar theater located at the mall and enjoying a large carton of popcorn. Anyway, about mid Friday afternoon, I advanced to the T intersection bordering the mall, with the intent of turning right on Westheimer. For some odd reason this guy pulls up beside me outbound in the inbound lane. I didn't know what he was trying to do: cross Westheimer and turn left? We must have been sitting there for 2 minutes waiting for a break in traffic. The whole time this other driver (in a business suit) never looked in my direction. We finally see a break in traffic, and before I can react, the guy, without looking, cuts across my lane, burying his right bumper into my left front fender. We get out of our cars, and after seeing the damage, the man turns to me and asks, "Was that fender already damaged?" Expletive deleted. The man's insurance company (which will remain nameless, but let's just say I've hated umbrellas since the incident) denied the claim citing I didn't specify the correct number of lanes in my accident report to police. Of course, because the other driver was at fault, my own insurance company refused to do anything. Let's just say that I figured out a way that left the other driver's insurance company with no choice but to pay off the denied claim, which is easier said than done when you're a full-time student with no assets going up against an insurer's legal department: at least David had a slingshot to use against Goliath.
And trust me--you don't want to be in a middle lane on the Southwest Freeway in Friday evening rush, when your engine light is flashing red, overheating (I later discovered my radiator hose had sprung a leak). The cars in the right lanes wouldn't let me through, and unsuspecting cars, seeing a break behind my car, rushed forward, only to find that I wasn't moving. They of course started swearing at me and repeatedly blaring their horns; much to their surprise, that didn't help.
No, I've had multiple clients in Los Angeles while living in Silicon Valley, and I've been in notorious I-405 and I-105 traffic. And anyone in Silicon Valley knows about Highway 101 (in fact, most of my flights were in and out of SFO, not San Jose). During the 10 years or so I lived in the Chicago area, I was one of the early adopters of I-PASS/E-ZPASS on the various tollroads in the area.
Capitol Beltway traffic (I-495) is notoriously bad and unbearable in inclement weather. I used to complain to co-workers that all it took was someone throwing a damp handkerchief on the Beltway, and traffic would slow to a crawl. When I worked at IBM's Fairfax facility, just off I-66, I had a staggered shift and I was lucky enough to be commuting in the less congested direction (west in the morning, east in the evening towards the Beltway). Traffic wasn't that bad when I left after 7 PM. Until Thanksgiving Eve: I was expecting clear sailing all the way home--and found myself sitting in traffic, which was stop-and-go just a couple of miles west of the Beltway. It took me nearly 2.5 hours to get home that evening.
People do all sorts of weird things while sitting in traffic; I pass the time thinking of things like--I wonder if they ever thought of taking HOV lanes and converting them into toll lanes. (Hybrid systems can work--consider the Dulles tollway (Route 267); you can drive toll-free lanes directly to the airport from the Beltway.)
Yes, I am going somewhere with this discussion. While living in the outer suburbs of Baltimore, none of my gigs have been in the Baltimore area; I've usually traveled south, especially DC and northern Virginia. (I moved to the distant Baltimore suburbs because my initial assignment in the area involved working at the National Archives in College Park, just inside the northern section of the Beltway. I didn't want to live in areas near the University of Maryland campus.) Traffic is still bad north of the loop until you get around Laurel. In any event, during the more recent past while traversing to and from the Beltway, I noticed some congestion and construction workers in the area; it was fairly clear they were in the process of building an overpass, but I didn't know what that was about (I didn't notice any signs explaining the construction going on, but I hate rubberneckers to begin with).
At the same time, I was fielding calls from recruiters, knowing local traffic, asking hesitantly about any interest in gigs in or near Rockville and Gaithersburg. Just to provide context, I-70 runs from the west just north of Baltimore and intersects with the the 695 outer loop of Baltimore. At Frederick, roughly an hour's drive away from 695, I-270 splits off in the direction of Washington DC. I-270 is a technology corridor, and the two mentioned cities are located a few miles west of the Beltway alongside I-270. From where I live, it's not easy to get to Rockville. I once did a gig for a biotech company based out of Frederick which had acquired a Rockville-based company using Oracle's ERP software with which I've had significant experience (in addition to its database software). On 2 or 3 days a week I would have to drive to the subsidiary and work on various projects. So normally I had to drive north to I-70, drive to headquarters, and then drive to Rockville up I-270. The other way was just as uninviting a commute: maybe 6 miles to the Beltway (the section between I-95N and I-270 is never pleasant driving) and then head for several miles to an exit shy of BWI, just south of 695.
I had also done a few interviews in that area including a section of Bethesda just west of the Beltway and north of the I-270 corridor; I used to get exasperated, asking no one whom listened why there wasn't a road running, say, between Rockville and Laurel, rather than these tortuous congested roundabout routes. (There are some routes via congested local roads, but I've normally relied on Internet mapping services which will default to the routes I've described.)
So that's, in fact, what this was. I recently had a meeting in Arlington and on the way back noticed the roadwork had been completed: it was a tollway with some unusual (to my tollway experiences) characteristics. And in fact the ICC/MD200 does exactly what I considered to be an obvious need (although, granted, local residents had motives over and beyond my interest in a direct route to avoid the Beltway traffic or driving through Frederick). The MDTA promises the new tollway will cut local commute times up to 70%. For example, consider this description (somebody needs to update their webpage, because the road is open...):
Once the ICC opens to I-95 at Laurel, a traveler can expect to nearly cut the trip in half from Gaithersburg to BWI Marshall Airport, completing it in 37 minutes by taking the ICC, compared to a 71-minute trip via local roads (Shady Grove Road to MD 115 to MD 28 to MD 198 to I-95). This equates to a 48% reduction in travel time.So a lot of people might think--so what? We know about tollroads. What's so special about this one? Well, I'll tell you. It may well be the same characteristics are available elsewhere, but they are novel to my driving experience with tollways: (1) there are no change booths; you have to use E-ZPASS (you may think, well, how can this work if people get on the road without E-ZPASS? Of course, there have been dedicated E-ZPASS lanes for some time, even when I lived in Chicago over 8 years ago. They record toll violators and you are mailed a bill with a significantly more expensive toll amount.); (2) there is variable toll pricing. This is a step that most of us advocating for some time in proposing private tollroads: you charge different rates to encourage a more uniform utilization of the system. Of course, this is not a new concept, even for public transportation: for example, if you use the DC Metro system, rates are significantly lower between rush hours. The concept has been used in other contexts as well in the private sector, such as those notorious early dinner specials for senior citizens at many local restaurants.
I know private toll roads have become more widely accepted in cash-strapped states like Texas. (And I really don't want to get into the dishonest political game playing in Washington, say, with gasoline taxes, meant for highway maintenance.) I have no idea why, like in the case of social security, K-12 education, and the Post Office, the US, with supposedly a free market economy, has resisted free market approaches adopted elsewhere, even under the Communist regime in China. What I see are things like rampant crony unionism, unfunded liabilities, lack of accountability, theft from "lockboxes" to fund operational expenses, and other abuses, which hypocritical progressives, if even a fraction of these abuses existed in the private sector, would be screaming at the top of their lungs. Whereas these history-challenged neo-Keynesians gripe about so-called "market failures", when, for once, are we going to get real (as Dr. Phil McGraw would say) about VERY REAL public sector failures?
[4/28/12: See here for an update.]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Paul McCartney & Wings, "My Love". One of my favorite McCartney love songs; it ranks up there with "Here, There and Everywhere" and "Maybe I'm Amazed".
