Expecting that the Metro shutdown would increase traffic, Maryland officials wisely put out messages asking people to try to carpool. Then, they… told them not to, by waiving carpool rules on Interstate 270.

Photo by bankbryan on Flickr.

First, the State Highway Administration suggested more carpooling and teleworking. Sensible advice.

To get more people into and out of DC, some contributors suggested limiting some bridges or major avenues to carpool-only. Instead, Maryland took the opposite tack, announcing carpool restrictions would be waived for I-270. Contributor Gray Kimbrough, an economist, was incredulous.

A few hours later, the decision was reversed.

It’s fairly common for HOV restrictions to be lifted in unusual circumstances, but to do that here makes it seem like there’s just an automatic knee-jerk reaction to do so.

Dennis Jaffe suggested that officials might feel solo driving commuters would blame them for traffic. He envisioned a hypothetical elected official thinking as follows:

If I don’t support the HOV restrictions being lifted tomorrow, and especially if they aren’t lifted, I know that hundreds of angry commuters will jam my phone lines, demanding to know why the h*** I supported keeping the HOV restrictions in place, when they will tell my staff they had no choice but to drive to work, and because they couldn’t drive in the lane usually reserved for HOV, they were massively late for work.

They will say that we made a bad situation worse, saying that if they could have driven in the HOV lanes, they wouldn’t have been as late as we made them. And they’ll pressure me to support lifting them for the afternoon commute home.

One, overly simplistic, way to look at an HOV restriction is that it’s a limitation on cars to try to save the environment or something; when things are crazy, you need to just prioritize moving as many people as possible.

Economically-minded folks, on the other hand, would note that there needs to be every incentive to carpool.

It’s true that, given the shorter notice, not a lot of people who currently don’t carpool would have had time to arrange carpools. It’s not the same as telling people a week ahead of time that they have to carpool on a specific day. But at least there’s no reason to discourage those who already do, unless officials thought some carpoolers would lose their carpool buddies to telework, and didn’t want to discourage those people teleworking… except those people weren’t adding cars to the road in the first place.

Update: Maryland officials decided to waive HOV rules again after all for the evening rush:

Kimbrough wrote,

I guess at least now they can say that they’re not discouraging carpooling, since (almost) everyone who was planning to carpool in that direction during the PM rush already made those plans. This time it’s exclusively hurting carpoolers for the benefit of solo drivers and bus passengers.

The VA Express Lanes operator was promoting a tweet about how they were donating “excess” revenue to charity. A pretty obvious ploy for positive publicity, but at least they seem to recognize the point of the HOT lane tolls.

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Tagged: carpooling, i 270, maryland, metro shutdown, roads, sha, transit

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.