News Flash: Drivers Avoid Tolls, Sightline Daily, June 28, 2012

Over the past couple of months, we have detailed how the explosive growth in tolls in the Dulles Toll Road as forecast by MWAA's traffic and revenue forecaster, CDM Smith, will result in the diversion of a substantial volume of traffic to other local roads.  The diversion derives from two sources:

• The toll increases become less affordable for drivers and their "value of time" calculation (a CDM Smith turn of phrase--price elasticity of demand in economic-speak) makes them change their preference for using other roads.
• Over time, the growth of jobs and population along the toll road corridor sees an unmet potential as many of these new potential toll road users divert to other roads, switch to some form of public transit, or work from home.  

The results as we have calculated them suggest the following near and long-term consequences:

• Next year, if tolls double as forecast, CDM Smith forecasts that toll road use will decline by 18%--or 36,000 trips per day given the more than 200,000 daily trips on the toll road according to a survey by CDM Smith.  Since there will be no Metrorail and Fairfax and Loudoun County have no plans to expand bus transit for the one-year gap before Phase 1 of the Silver Line is in service, that means 36,000 trips per days on area roads.
• In 2050, more than 100,000 trips per day will be diverted to local roads by our calculations.  That allows for one-quarter of the future growth in employment and population in the "prime market area" (roughly the area north of Rt. 50 and east of Rt. 15--Leesburg) to take public transit (bus & rail) or work from home.  The job and residential growth estimates are those by CDM Smith's socio-economic forecaster, Renaissance Planning Group.  

Here's what that result looks like over the next four decades:

 


Now it appears that we are not alone in forecasting huge traffic diversions from exorbitant toll increases.  Sightline, a non-profit Washington state-based planning group, reports in an article by Clark Williams-Derry in Sightline Daily that Seattle in facing the consequences of major toll increases for a major area tunnel.  Here is how his article, "News Flash: Drivers Avoid Tolls," begins:

For Seattle traffic-watchers, Mike Lindblom at the Seattle Times has the most important story of the month: the news that a new state traffic study predicts that high rush hour tolls on the Alaskan Way Viaduct tunnel will divert 9,100 cars into downtown Seattle during the afternoon commute. For those of you who are counting, that’s a diversion rate of about 42 percent.

The Times editors considered it a bombshell. It was the day’s top story, above the fold, with a huge headline.

But here’s the thing: it’s not really news. Well, it’s only sort of news. I mean, there really was a new tolling study on the Viaduct, and it really did predict that lots of drivers would avoid the tolls by driving on surface streets. Yet the new study reached almost exactly the same conclusion that WSDOT itself reached last year.

Williams-Derry makes an important observation about why the insight--provided a year earlier--was largely ignored:

I suspect it’s part of a regrettable human foible: in context of a political campaign or a hotly contested public policy controversy, people view facts as weapons for winning arguments, rather than as a means for discovering the truth. When emotions run hot, the press tends to evaluate factual claims for how they’ll affect each side’s political fortunes, not for whether they’re important or true.

Now that the the political controversy has subsided, the press can once again cover the facts about the Viaduct a little more rationally: weighing their validity and exploring the implications. Better late than never I suppose. Still it’s a shame: just when the public was in greatest need of solid facts, the press seemed more focused on the politics than the substance.

In the context of the Dulles Toll Road, we have seen some reporting on the toll increase-traffic diversion phenomenon from local newspapers, particularly Patch.   Still, most of the media's focus has been on the comments of politicians and advocates (pro or con, left or right) rather than on the facts--more accurately, a balance assessment of the available data--as Williams-Derry suggests. 

So while the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors cared not a whit about these assessments nor conducted any of their own on the implications of higher tolls, the Loudoun Board considered but disregarded the traffic and other implications of huge toll increases on BOTH the DTR and the Greenway, and the state of Virginia has not even begun to fathom the implications for its transportation budget planning, we now face a situation where all parties are flailing to find funding to lower tolls and minimize the impact of diversions.

When politics trumps rational and systematic planning and problem solving, the community--local, county, state, and even federal--pay the consequences of poor decision making, in this case, for at least four decades.