Opinion, reasoned debate, occasional rage.

HOV comes to Yorkshire

April 22nd, 2008 Posted in Observations, Road news

Not a new story - it was in the news a month ago now - but worth covering anyway.

The UK’s first motorway car share lane was opened today by Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, giving drivers a new opportunity to cut both their journey times and carbon footprints.
Highways Agency press release

Good work, Ruth. This new lane is a quick bodge-job linking the M606 southbound to the M62 eastbound at Chain Bar near Bradford. It’s mostly just a new traffic lane painted on the existing hard shoulder, with a little observation platform for the Police to sit on. It is open to any car, bus or taxi that has more than one person in it.

On the previous incarnation of the CBRD Blog, I had a rant about HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes, and specifically the one that had been planned for the widened M1 close to London. The argument against them is quite simple and runs like this. To take the M1 as an example, there would be four lanes on each carriageway, one of them marked as HOV.

If less than 25% of vehicles on the road have two or more people in them, then that fourth lane will be emptier than the others, leaving the other three to carry more traffic. The fourth lane, added at extravagant cost, is therefore not pulling its weight in terms of traffic capacity.

On the other hand, if 25% or more of the vehicles on the road have two or more people in them, then the HOV lane will be as full as any other lane, and the distinction will be meaningless.

So let’s take a look at how this applies to Bradford. The Highways Agency themselves provide a nice picture of it, with Ruth Kelly beaming in the foreground. There she is on the right. The HOV lane is the one on the right of the picture, complete with “2+ LANE” markings, which is completely empty.

And there’s the problem.

An HOV lane is not a device to improve a congested road. It is not something that will shorten queues and reduce problems. Instead, it peddles a political viewpoint; all stick and no carrot. If it were designed to make the situation better, that extra lane free-flowing past the roundabout would be open to everyone, it would be full of traffic of all kinds and it would therefore provide the maximum possible relief to the junction. Instead, it is under-used, providing reduced benefits to everyone else. It doesn’t even help everyone with two or more occupants: if its capacity was used to the full, the queue for the roundabout itself would be shorter, but as things stand, those wanting to travel in other directions from the M606 must sit in those elongated queues full of single-occupant vehicles who ought to be free-flowing past the roundabout.

When the HOV lane for the widened M1 was first floated, the DfT spent a lot of time talking about “locking in” the effects of widening so that the road wouldn’t fill up with traffic again. This makes my blood boil in any case, because surely the point of building or widening a road is that it will fill up with traffic - otherwise it’s not doing its job. But an HOV lane “locks in” no benefits. It locks out most road users and ensures that the extra capacity will be under-used and wasted. In terms of “locking in the benefits”, it makes sure that the new fourth lane is forever as empty as the day it opened, but that’s just something that looks good, not something that benefits anyone.

The future of the M1 HOV lane already looks shaky because local Police forces say they won’t enforce it. Good luck to them. But I suspect the M606 example will be wasting everyone’s time for many years to come.

  1. 5 Responses to “HOV comes to Yorkshire”

  2. By Moogal on Apr 30, 2008

    The HOV along the A47 in Birmingham is similarly pointless, as the A47 itself does not tend to suffer from much in the way of congestion along that stretch. What does cause holdups are the junctions with other, busier and lower-capacity routes such as the outer cirle, which cause queues on the A47, except now you’re only allowed to queue in one lane, which means twice the length of queue and a mad bit of lane changing in the last 50 yards where the sharing lane ends. Madness.

  3. By Bryn on Apr 30, 2008

    The main different between the A47 Fort Parkway and the M606 lanes are of course that the Birmingham example is at least only in part time operation. If the HA were serious about minimising peak hour traffic, they would open the M606 lane to all vehicles between 10am-3pm and 6pm-7am. As they haven’t it smacks of ’social engineering’ rather than ‘traffic engineering’.

    I have used both examples, for what it is worth, wasn’t overly impressed by either.

  4. By Dave G on May 19, 2008

    Simple answer to all this New Labour bulls**t…Is to practice civil disobiediance. If we all do it, and use HOV lanes etc, and then demand to go to court rather than pay a ticket, then the courts will be sick to death of dealing with it. But the government knows it can divide and conquer us, and we’ll submit like we did with speed cameras and the congestion charge etc. About time we grew some spuds and fought back against Neue Arbeit and their idiotic schemes like making traffic lights at pedestrian crossings default to red on the main route in order to calm traffic (on an empty road at 3 AM), like in Telford town centre.

  5. By Guy Barry on May 31, 2008

    “If less than 25% of vehicles on the road have two or more people in them, then that fourth lane will be emptier than the others, leaving the other three to carry more traffic. The fourth lane, added at extravagant cost, is therefore not pulling its weight in terms of traffic capacity.”

    But isn’t that the point? You could use the same argument against bus lanes - they’re definitely not “pulling their weight in terms of traffic capacity”. The whole idea is to create a section of the road that’s less congested than other sections in order to encourage people to use it. If it carries roughly the same level of traffic as the other lanes, then there’s no incentive.

    Guy

  6. By Jonathan Winkler on Jun 10, 2008

    I agree with Guy on this one. What I call the “25% plus one” criticism of HOV lanes ranks with SABRE old chestnuts like the idea that great quantities of unused capacity would suddenly become available on motorways if everyone observed perfect lane discipline.

    The reality, at least in the USA where it is used extensively, is that HOV is designed not just to incentivize ridesharing, but also to provide institutional support for transit usage in large metropolitan areas where travel demand is both intense and highly elastic with regard to the supply of roadspace. This is why freeway HOV lanes tend to be closely connected with transit facilities, e.g. through freeway median P&R lots or so-called “direct access” interchanges which feed directly into bus stations.

    The success or otherwise of HOV lanes can be highly regionally specific. On I-287 in New Jersey, for example, abolishing HOV restrictions resulted in more efficient use of the roadspace, but on the I-10 El Monte busway in California a similar exercise in derestriction resulted in increased congestion and hardship on users dependent on reliable timing (e.g., mothers picking their children up at day-care centers which levy a $5 per minute fine for late pickups).

    Various strategies have been tried for finessing the tradeoff between utilization and incentivization for HOV lanes–such as permitting single-occupancy hybrids and ILEVs to use them, or converting them to “managed lanes” where there is an element of pricing according to occupancy level and the prices are dynamically adjusted to keep the lanes flowing at a given level of service. The US is ahead of the curve in developing these techniques because of its combination of large metropolitan areas with high car ownership, and frankly I doubt HOV will be widely useful in the UK outside of some niche segments. But this does not mean that the principle of providing HOV lanes is nonsensical.

    Old physicist’s proverb: Life is not a Carnot engine.

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