interesting, personally I think the reversible HOV lanes in Northern VA work well but we def. need to either raise the HOV number or the toll to keep the buses moving -
as some of you might know there are only two transit links between Staten Island and the other boroughs without having to go through NJ.
One is the Staten Island Ferry which, while free, only serves lower manhattan and requires a subway connection to reach Midtown. The other is a bus via the Verrazano Bridge/Gowanus Expwy. which offers direct service to Midtown - well here's a clip - of what happened after Sept. 11th.
"Emergency measures immediately created a bus rapid transit corridor through Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Manhattan that before existed only in transit planners' dreams. NYC Transit express buses share an exclusive right-of-way with emergency vehicles in one eastbound lane from the beginning of the Staten Island Expressway at the Goethals Bridge over the Verrazano Bridge, along the Gowanus Expressway HOV lane, through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and up the FDR Drive to Houston Street. This route is normally the least preferred by Staten Island commuters because express buses are regularly stuck in SIE stop-and-go traffic and delayed on the clogged Gowanus HOV lane, which is open to cars with two or more passengers. Under the new rules last week, bus drivers reported "flying" into Manhattan at speeds that one transit official told the SI Advance reduced trip times by as much as 45 minutes. "
since then the NYCDOT has been tinkering with the HOV number and the results have changed accordingly.
Here's another interesting tidbit -
Even excluding rail transit, single-occupant cars move fewer than a third of all highway commuters, but they fill up more than half of Manhattan-bound morning traffic. In other words, the solo-driving minority is taking up an absolute majority of road space.
Writing in today's (Oct. 1) Newsday, Komanoff noted that "The resulting congestion ensnares everyone from car-poolers and bus riders to the solo drivers themselves. Vans carrying tradespeople and trucks laden with goods the city needs to keep its economy going have been especially hard hit," he noted.
"Think of all eight crossings into Manhattan as a 20-lane highway," Komanoff wrote. "Single-occupant vehicles, accounting for 53 percent of traffic, occupy 11 lanes but they deliver only 30 percent of commuters - just six lanes' worth."
The five wasted lanes are the equivalent of closing both the Queens Midtown Tunnel and the Brooklyn Bridge. Radio traffic reports call it "congestion," Komanoff noted, but it's really just inefficiency.
If you throw in the 400,000+ that cross each morning by ferry, subway, and rail those SOV's are delivering more like 10% of inbound commuters but are responsible for half of the traffic.