By Steven Ginsberg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 26, 2004; Page B01

Laura Newport is all giddy about her commute these days. Not having to sit in traffic for 40 minutes a day will do that to a person. The extra half-hour or so of sleep doesn't hurt either, and she just loves her car.

But for all her good cheer, if Jim Haskell passed her in the carpool lanes they both take, he would be livid. Haskell gets up before dawn each day to catch a ride to Washington with strangers so they can hop onto the faster-moving lanes, and he doesn't think he should have to go to such extremes while people like Newport get to cruise happily on through -- alone.

Then again, Newport drives a hybrid, a combination electric and gas car. And to the dismay of Haskell and many others like him, hybrids are not bound by the rules for high occupancy vehicle lanes.

"I have nothing against hybrids, but I think it's time to get them to pull their weight," Haskell said on a recent afternoon while waiting for a fellow carpooler before heading home to Woodbridge on Interstates 395 and 95. "I've never seen a hybrid with three people in it."

Thousands of Northern Virginians have purchased hybrids in recent years, many of them specifically because they are allowed to drive them, solo, in HOV lanes.

Drivers say being able to use the lanes has changed their lives, allowing them to cut their commuting time, freeing them from bothersome carpools, expanding their career options and adding a bit more sanity to what used to be the most stressful times of their days.

But as hybrids become more popular and HOV lanes get more congested, a battle has erupted between owners and carpoolers over whether the vehicles' environmental benefits justify the HOV exemption.

The dispute has reverberated through Congress, Virginia's General Assembly and state agencies. Some leaders want to extend the state's hybrid exemption, set to expire in 2006, and others want it to end for fear that HOV lanes will become parking lots, like the regular lanes they are intended to relieve.

The debate cuts to the heart of the purpose of HOV lanes, which are on I-95, I-395, I-66 and the Dulles Toll Road. Are they designed to ease Northern Virginia's high levels of bad air? Or are they designed to ease Northern Virginia's high levels of bad traffic?

"One would like to think of those goals as not being mutually exclusive," said state Transportation Secretary Whittington W. Clement. "But I think that we are going to reach a point where policymakers will have to make a decision about which way they're going to go."

Hybrids have both electric and gas engines, generally using battery power at lower speeds and automatically switching to gas at higher speeds. The batteries are recharged by the gas engine and energy created by braking. Current models get up to 60 miles a gallon and emit considerably smaller amounts of harmful gases than conventional cars.

Low-emission vehicles were first allowed to use HOV lanes in 1994, but few drivers took advantage until hybrids were included in 2000. That year, there were 32 cars in all of Virginia with "clean fuel" tags -- a designation necessary to use HOV lanes. By March 13 of this year there were about 5,300 of them, the overwhelming number of them hybrids. Ninety-five percent of those cars are in Northern Virginia.

Those numbers figure to expand considerably as more hybrid models are rolled out. Honda plans to sell a hybrid version of its popular Accord later this year. Ford, Toyota and Lexus will offer hybrid SUVs, and Chevrolet, GMC and Dodge will market hybrid pickups.

Walter McManus, an automotive analyst for J.D. Power and Associates, said he expects the national hybrid market to grow from about 40,000 car sales in 2003 to about 100,000 this year and to reach half a million vehicles by 2008.

Each model must be approved separately for clean fuel status, and state officials said the only criterion used so far is that they operate on a combination of electricity and gas. The Toyota Prius, Honda Civic and Honda Insight qualify.

One glitch in Virginia's hybrid exemption is that it's actually illegal. U.S. Department of Transportation officials wrote to the Virginia Department of Transportation a year ago informing the agency that the hybrid exemption countered federal policy; the federal agency, however, has allowed the exemption to continue because Congress is considering whether to permit it.

Arizona officials said they will allow hybrids in HOV lanes if Congress permits. California and several other states are considering similar measures. Maryland transportation officials said they have no plans to allow hybrids in HOV lanes.

Kurt Kessler, general sales manager of Leesburg Honda, said the HOV exemption is the biggest reason people buy hybrids at his dealership. "They know the deal," he said. He added that most customers also know that the exemption could end in two years, but the "consensus is that they're not going to have all these cars in the marketplace and just drop it."

But that's exactly what many would like to see, especially that special brand of commuters known as "slugs" who stand outside in all weather to form spontaneous carpools and who are acutely aware of all things HOV.

"The people buying these hybrids are buying them so they can stay in HOVs by themselves," said Laura Charles Johnson, who carpools between Dumfries and the District each day. "It's not like they're taking three cars off the road; they're just switching from the main lanes to HOV. That's not really reducing traffic."

She and other carpoolers said backups in HOV lanes have become so bad at peak times that they aren't much faster than regular lanes. Cheaters are a big problem, she said, but so are hybrids.

"If the numbers keep going up, it's inevitable we're going to start having major, major problems on HOV," Johnson said.

A traffic tally taken last fall for VDOT showed that 250 of the 6,000 cars -- or 4 percent -- on the I-95 HOV lanes south of Springfield were hybrids. State transportation officials said that number is likely much higher because tags are difficult to spot. They also said the number of hybrids has multiplied in the last six months, as have complaints about them.

Ron Kirby, transportation planning director for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, described a ripple effect if HOV lanes bog down. First, slugs would suffer, then bus service, which relies on HOV access, which would affect access to Metrorail, all of which would lead to more people driving cars.

"Once these lanes get congested, the whole thing collapses," Kirby said.

That's why a state-sponsored task force last summer recommended doing away with the hybrid exemption in 2006.

Nevertheless, some members of the General Assembly are eager to extend it.

"One of the reasons for HOV lanes was to encourage carpooling to reduce car emissions, and these hybrids are clean-air vehicles," said Del. Brian J. Moran (D-Alexandria).

Moran dismissed concerns that there would be too many hybrids for the HOV lanes to work. "If everybody starts driving a hybrid, that would be terrific," he said. "But that's unlikely to occur."

It might be more likely if everyone talked to Jim Wine. His pre-hybrid life was a nonstop string of stress. He would leave his Haymarket home hours before he needed to be at his Arlington office, and he'd still get there late. He never knew when he would get home, ruining many a dinner. And all the uncertainty affected his sleep.

Ahhh, but that is just a distant memory. Now he relaxes in the mornings because he knows he can get to work in an hour. Watching the sun set at home rather than over I-66 is another treat. Stress? What stress?

"To add that much stress back into my life," Wine said, "would be enough to make me go look for a new job."

The same rings true for Newport, who lives in Alexandria and said she saves up to 40 minutes a day by using HOV lanes on I-395. "I don't get to work as tense and uptight," she said. "My whole day is a little easier and smoother."

But in the back of her mind Newport knows that her joy may not last. "In 2001, I could count on two hands how many hybrids I'd see in the morning," she said. "Now it seems every other car is a hybrid, and it's starting to cause congestion in HOV. If we're all starting to buy these hybrids just to commute, we need to look at that."