I-66 Express Lanes Save Users Time, and the Price Is Right

It didn’t take long for the storyline surrounding Virginia’s Inside the Beltway express lanes along Interstate 66 to turn from positive to laudatory.

With the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) releasing a glowing operational report for January, the lanes are proving once again what tolling agencies already know: nothing succeeds like success, and the more drivers become familiar with the benefits of tolled facilities, the better they like it.

VDOT’s monthly performance report is a compelling read for anyone with even a passing interest in smart surface transportation solutions: it documents nearly 600,000 trips along the express lanes, 272,000 eastbound in the morning and 322,000 westbound in the afternoon, in a single month! The agency recorded a 10-mile-per-hour increase in average travel speeds compared to January 2017. That translated into a 3.7-minute saving on average travel times in the morning, and 2.8 minutes in the afternoon—adding up to at least 31,842 hours saved across the customer base.

And that math is low, because it assumes one occupant per vehicle—even though 43% of the vehicle trips were carpools. So, carpooling is working and those in car pools pay no toll.

The Price is Right

With solid operational data in hand, the focus is quickly beginning to shift from what the road costs to what it’s achieving.

The story less than three months ago, in the first few days of opening, was focused on the hand full of drivers who choose to pay the $40 maximum price to drive a 10-mile stretch of road during peak hours. But fast forward to VDOT’s data release earlier this month, and the numbers tell a new story. The average round-trip price on the road was $12.37, $8.07 eastbound and $4.30 westbound. The maximum charge of $40 or more applied to 461 trips—0.08% of the total, or one out of every 1,290 trips.

And it’s safe to assume that, even for the drivers who opted for the express lane at the maximum charge, the price was at a time when highway usage was at the max and they most likely had to get where they were going on time.

The other good news, as expected, the availability of tolled capacity on I-66 improved travel times and speeds along parallel arterials, including Routes 7, 29, and 50 and the George Washington Memorial Parkway. VDOT also reports that nearly seven out of eight of the vehicles on the road—87%—were using some form of E-ZPass, in either HOV or toll mode.

The Bigger Picture

Robert Puentes, President and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation, called the I-66 express lanes a pioneering experiment that is being closely watched by transportation specialists across the U.S.

“The experiment was trying to figure out how much drivers are willing to pay for a guaranteed, delay-free trip through one of the densest corridors in the region at the most congested time,” Puentes told WAMU 88.5, the public radio station at American University. But “part of the success is looking at whether we are actually reducing travel times. Are we actually making the commute better for people? And what the VDOT report showed is that the travel speeds on 66 are actually getting better. The drivers on the parallel roads are not experiencing any additional problems from people spilling over into those roads. In fact, they’re finding similar benefits and less traffic and less volume in those roads, as well.”

Puentes also pointed to I-66’s success in encouraging more users to carpool. “About 12,000 trips each day are happening in carpools. That’s a better and more efficient use of the roadway network, complementing things like Metro rail, which also goes very close to I-66 in Arlington,” he said.

“So this is part of a larger initiative to deal with traffic, to deal with some of the redevelopment challenges that we’re having, and not continue on the sprawl-as-usual approach, which just makes traffic worse.”

Get the big picture on managed lanes, all-electronic tolling, and toll technology by registering today for IBTTA’s Managed, Lanes, AET & Technology Summit, April 22-24, 2018 in Charlotte, NC.