Responding to Your Questions About HOV Lanes
Thursday, September 25, 2008 5:39 PM
We have received more comments on a post about HOV lanes last Friday than any other post since we launched this blog 19 months ago. By 2 p.m. today, we received 106 comments on that one post, far outpacing the second most commented post with 65 comments.
Many of you are wondering why METRO took so long to open the HOV lanes - and why the I-45 South HOV lane remains closed.
We understand how infuriating it is to sit in miles of traffic that rivals the gridlock prompted by Hurricane Rita three years ago. It's maddening to see an unused HOV lane free of cars while you're burning gas, inching along, bumper-to-bumper.
The mantra that has driven all our decisions has been this: Safety first.
"We are unwavering when it comes to safety," said METRO Police Chief Tom Lambert. "We know the frustration. At the same time, just because it's awful doesn't mean you cut corners and cross your fingers, and hope you have it safe enough. We don't want to sacrifice safety for convenience."
Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how we made our decisions on the HOV lanes.
The planning began before the storm. METRO anticipated the city would experience massive power outages - and that's exactly what occurred. Immediately after the storm, on Sept. 15, we communicated to CenterPoint Energy what our priority needs were for the restoration of service, said Lambert.
Where did we need bus service first? Buses that served critical needs locations - hospitals and clinics, grocery stores, drug stores, and major employment areas - were on the list. We told CenterPoint where our Transit Centers were located, our Park & Ride lots, and power sub-stations for the rail.
"Included in our list of priorities were the HOV lanes," said Lambert. "It's important for people to realize that HOV lanes aren't just concrete and barricades. There are a lot of entrances and exits to those HOV lanes that are controlled by gates that operate on electricity. And depending on the HOV lane, there can be multiple gates and electronic signage that are there for safety reasons. We want to give credit to CenterPoint because it has been working very responsibly and cooperatively with us."
Some of you have wondered why we didn't simply deploy METRO police officers to direct traffic and manually operate the gates. We simply didn't have the manpower to staff an area as physically large as the HOV lanes, while also balancing the need to ensure the safety of our officers.
Sending police officers to manually operate gates would be exposing them to high safety risks in the HOV lanes. "It's a high-speed operating environment. And if appropriate safety systems are not in place, you can experience wrong-way movement that can be catastrophic. We're going to make sure we side on the safety focus," said Lambert.
In addition, many HOV lanes would have required multiple officers.
"If you took all the places without power on those HOV lanes - for each HOV lane and each gate on each HOV lane - in many places, you can't just have one officer, you need two officers," explained Lambert. "You'd need a back-up officer so the primary officer could go on a bathroom break. Even if we had deployed one to two officers to manually operate a gate, we didn't have enough officers in our force to handle that," said Lambert. "We were also providing officers to assist in the evacuation of citizens and recovery efforts in the community. We had also been in close coordination with Houston Police Department and sheriff's offices to see how we could bring our community back to normalcy.
So why didn't we supplement our police force with the Houston police officers or county sheriffs?
More than 2,000 intersections were without traffic signals, and HPD focused on putting officers at those intersections while also trying to balance staffing at distribution centers and overall recovery efforts, pointed out Lambert.
Last weekend, on Sept. 20, we began developing interim measures we could implement in the absence of full power to the HOV lanes. We considered generators, as some of you have suggested.
We nixed that idea for safety reasons. Generators do malfunction, and at the end of the day, we didn't want to put the safety of officers and the customers who use the HOV lanes in the hands of a piece of equipment that could break or freeze.
So why did it take so long for METRO to open the HOV lanes?
As traffic built up this weekend, everyone, including METRO, was trying to do whatever we could to get the HOV lanes operational as soon as possible. On Monday, Sept. 22, we opened the I-45 North HOV lane.
By Tuesday, we opened three more HOV lanes for a total of four operating HOV lanes. We were able to do so because power was gradually being restored.
"We didn't need as many officers on Tuesday as we would have needed on Monday. It became a manageable position to open them even without full power to the HOV lanes restored," said Lambert.
Did METRO only open the lanes after pressure from city and county officials?
"We'd been working on plans to reopen the HOV lanes and had requested that power be restored since Sept. 15. We have stayed in constant communication with the city of Houston and Harris County throughout the crisis and recovery period. We have on-going dialogue with the overall emergency response effort. We opened them because we had a way to do it safely," said Lambert.
When will the I-45 South HOV lane reopen? We don't have a definite answer, but it's a matter of days, not weeks. We'll keep you posted on this blog. As always, the decision to reopen will be driven by our mantra: Safety first.