Will Drivers Pay to Hurry Up and Wait?

Although project planners estimate rush-hour rates of about $1 a mile, traffic planners with the council of governments estimate that tolls would have to be exponentially higher to keep traffic moving at the speeds Fluor and Transurban are promising.

The highest tolls presumably would be charged near the most heavily traveled sectors.

Fluor and Transurban representatives declined to provide traffic estimates, configuration details or alternatives they are considering to reduce backlogs at the 14th Street Bridge and elsewhere. They directed all questions about the proposal to VDOT.

Project planners said they are working especially hard on solving the morning backlog on the 14th Street Bridge. The HOT lanes would end at Eads Street in Arlington County, but the two carpool lanes back up long before the Eads Street exit, often to Washington Boulevard.

Options mentioned by planners familiar with the project include restriping one of the spans on the 14th Street Bridge to create three lanes instead of two. Another would involve closing a ramp that allows traffic from the regular lanes to use the carpool lanes. And then there is the possibility of widening the bridge.

Another option would ease HOT lane traffic by adding a third lane or a dedicated bus lane to the Eads Street ramp that serves the Pentagon and Arlington.

The federal government also is studying the 14th Street Bridge to figure out solutions.

Chris Zimmerman (D), a member of the Arlington County Board, said the answer is fewer cars and more buses. He has suggested devoting one of the three HOT lanes to buses and allowing the buses to flow in a dedicated lane into the District.

On the American Legion Bridge, which carries the Beltway across the Potomac, project planners have changed their plans and are stopping the HOT lanes before the Georgetown Pike, the original end point.

But HOT lane drivers who continue onto the Georgetown Pike or across the often-congested American Legion Bridge will have to merge into the regular lanes and fight bridge traffic with regular people.

"The HOT lanes will taper from two to one lane, and that will merge into the general purpose lanes," said Ronaldo T. "Nick" Nicholson, a VDOT project manager who is responsible for making sure Northern Virginia's mega projects are coordinated.

But that won't solve the problem. "Eventually, we're going to have to widen the American Legion Bridge," Nicholson said.

Maryland is in the early stages of studying its own toll lane proposal that would eventually connect to the Virginia HOT lanes at the American Legion Bridge.

Kirby said Fluor and Transurban already have improved the original plans for HOT lane access to Tysons Corner, creating three entrances and exits instead of dumping all the traffic onto crowded Route 123. And the new HOT lane proposal would relieve a nightly traffic jam in Dumfries, where carpool lanes dump into the regular lanes.

"To their credit, after a lot of time and effort, they have three entry points into Tysons," Kirby said.

Some problems will not be solved by engineering but by market forces, such as a proposed HOT lane merge south of the Springfield interchange, where traffic from Tysons Corner, the District and the Pentagon will meet. That will probably mean high tolls.

"Traffic coming from the inner loop during the peak hour can't be such that it degrades the southbound traffic," Nicholson said. "It's going to metered with tolls. They are variable, and there are no caps on them. The market is going to be used to manage congestion. That is the premise of HOT lanes."