Quote:
Originally Posted by Arlington
Virginia has had HOV lanes for a long time, and the cat-and-mouse / cops-and-dummies game was well-advanced, even before the first HOT lanes went in on the Beltway (I-495) and I-95 (which feeds into I-395, the original HOV-3 system that works so well)
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Thanks. I guess that's a reasonable stopgap until they implement smarter image/video processing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Arlington
The problem on I-66 is congestion and its very high costs in both emissions and, more significantly, wasted human time. Maybe a teeny tiny discount for ZEVs is appropriate (I say this as a ZEV owner), but any SOV vehicle that slows everyone else down potentially imposes a lot of extra emissions and wastes a lot of carpoolers' time.
An SOV ZEV might be a 100 MPGe per passenger at highway speeds. An HOVthat gets 30 MPG highway, is getting 60 MPGe/passenger at HOV-2 and 90 MPGe/passenger at HOV-3. On a 10mile trip, that's not such a huge ZEV win compared to letting the lanes get congested.
And apparently congestion...in the form of extra vehicles at 5:30am that gum things up early (at a cheap or free time) are the problem right now.
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MPGe is an imperfect measurement and generally understates the advantage of a ZEV in comparison to an ICE vehicle. Even ignoring that and using your numbers, in your comparison the ZEV still has a better MPG/e per passenger yet gets no discount compared to the 3 passenger ICE receiving a 100% discount.
If we throw away the math, I still think incentivizing ZEV adoption is worth any added congestion, which is this case translates into a higher toll for single occupancy ICE vehicles rather than actual congestion.
(Someone would inevitably argue that this is a subsidization of ZEVs and then we would have get into the societal costs of burning fossil fuels, but let's skip that.)