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Bid On eBay To Speed Up Your Commute
malfunct writes "The traffic in the greater Seattle area is atrocious, and the State Government has been working hard to find a way to solve the issue. In the interim, they may use eBay as an innovative solution for estimating demand and raising funds. According to a MSNBC article, the plan is to use eBay to sell stickers that allow access for single driver vehicles to the car pool lane. The idea is to use eBay to find just how much a speedy commute is worth to drivers."
Everyone isn't able to buy it. There are a limited number. If they determine that an extra 100 or 200 cars per day in the lane won't matter (and having driven in HOV lanes, that's a lowball estimate) and they can generate $X amount of revenue, which never hurts, and can help fund things to benefit everyone....
Also, carpool lanes are just as much about cramped parking in Metro areas as fossil fuel emmissions.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Ummm.
I think you're missing the point. The state is trying to work out how much drivers will pay to get into the carpool lane. That is, this is an excercise.
So, they auction (say) 1,000 car pool stickers for a month in the fast lane (so to speak). By seeing what price is paid on eBay, they can calculate what pricing will allow new road building, public transport investment etc.
I live in Central London (in England). They recently imposed a congestion charge. Had they used eBay first, they might have discovered that the "correct" price was £3, not £5 to get traffic down to required levels.
Further, eBay is not a bad mechanism to rationing. Spaces in the car pool lane are a scarse resource (they won't sell more than they have room for... actually this government, scratch that) - why not work out what the right charge is using eBay, not by a fiat (or guess work).
--- My dad's political betting
In Washington DC the community slugs their way into the HOV lanes.
In a nutshell, folks driving alone on common routes who want to drive in the HOV lane pick up (car-less) complete strangers who also travel the same route. The driver gets to work more quickly. The passenger gets a free ride. The community gets less pollution and less traffic. Everybody wins.
If only Seattle would pick up on the trend! T'would solve their problems without any additional govenrment intervention whatsoever... without destroying the benefit of the HOV lanes.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
In Western Washington? HAH! You must not be from Seattle, my friend.
One would think that would be a viable solution..like the time the constituency voted against building a new Kingdome, but it was built anyway. Or the time there was a referendum to see if bridge parallel to the Tacoma Narrows bridge should be built, only won by 3%, and was built anyway, unchanged. Now, the ballpark was only an initial query, with no set location, but the new Tacoma Narrows will be plowing through neighborhoods and taking out houses. Surely, that should require a margin of voter hapiness greater than 3%. The area definitely has a history of shady tactics when it comes to gauging public interest.
--- What
I have a hard time understanding how the Washington Legislature think they can allow single riders when AZ was just threatened by the Feds to have their highway funding pulled for allowing Alternative Fuel vehicles to use their HOV lanes.
The following article was posted in the Arizona Republic back in Jan '03:
Bifuel vehicles seen as illegally hogging HOV lanes in Phoenix.
Source: Arizona Republic [Jan 28, 2003]
As you crawl along at 5 mph in rush-hour traffic, a few drivers zip by in the car-pool lane -
despite having no passengers
You know why: They have the "clean air" license plate, blue with puffy white clouds, identifying vehicles that don't spew out polluting fumes. Under federal law, states may allow alternative-fuel vehicles to use the HOV lane. The idea is that you can cut air pollution, one of the goals of HOV lanes, with clean-running cars, as well as by reducing the number of vehicles on the road. What you don't know is that most of those vehicles shouldn't be there.
Yup.
The state wrongly gives HOV access to cars and trucks that can run on either propane gas or gasoline. (Can we guess which fuel they're really using?) A quick trip to the Federal Highway Administration Web site shows that only vehicles that run exclusively on electricity or natural gas can use the HOV lanes.
Talk about adding insult to injury.
The injury: Arizona shelled out millions of dollars in rebates for buying vehicles equipped or retrofitted to run on natural gas. The deal, which gave buyers as much as 50 percent of the sticker price, including extras, was on the way to bankrupting the state before the plug was pulled.
The insult: Even the most conscientious alt-fuel owners have trouble refilling their natural gas because there's such a tiny network of suppliers.
And thanks to the rebate, people could afford huge trucks and oversized SUVs. So drivers are tooling along in the HOV lane while spewing out even more gunk than the average car. Arizona goofed. To follow federal rules, the state should yank those license plates. To play fair, we should at least require the owners to prove that they're using alternative fuel virtually all the time.
Meanwhile, the feds are denying HOV access to the new breed of hybrid electric cars, like the Prius, that produce so little pollution that they're called "super-ultra low-emissions vehicles." The hybrids don't meet federal requirements because they use electricity only part of the time.
Nine-tenths of a loaf is better than none, especially when fuel access and battery life are discouraging the sales of vehicles that don't run on gasoline.
Federal regulations must be expanded to include the lowest-polluting hybrid vehicles.
It would also make sense to include alt-fuel vehicles - if the owners can prove they're actually using alt fuel.
Otherwise, pull those plates.
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One reason Seattle traffic is worse than L.A. is geography. The L.A. Basin has many interconnecting roads and you can make a profession of traffic-listening and choosing the best route.
In Seattle, there's a few routes to a compressed downtown, and being squeezed by hills and water means: if the traffic report says slow, your SOL.
OTOH, that means Seattle is the perfect candidate for mass transit as you have fewer routes to cover.