A HOT Lane, short for High Occupancy Toll, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where it's known as the MnPass.

The dirty little secret about HOT lanes

In his Toronto Star op-ed , the C.D. Howe Institute’s Benjamin Dachis urges the government to “hang tough” and stick to its risky plan to introduce high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes in Ontario. The government should ignore such advice.

To his credit, Dachis does not argue (like the government does) that HOT lanes are a revenue tool for transit. He surely knows that outside of California, such schemes are expensive to build, and routinely lose money. A new 14-mile HOT lane in Washington DC lost over $11 million in just its first six weeks of operation.

Instead, he argues that HOT lanes can reduce congestion by selling the extra road space available in the carpool lane to paying drivers. Sounds reasonable, but Dachis is not telling you the whole story.

The dirty little secret of HOT lanes is this: the success of HOT lanes requires the failure of carpool lanes.

In Dachis' academic paper on the subject, he dismisses carpool lanes as ineffective, based on studies conducted in California.

Of course, California is not Ontario, but never mind: Dachis simply assumes carpool lanes must have also failed here, urging the government to sell all the unused road space that must surely exist.

But have carpool lanes really failed in Ontario? Is there actually extra road space available to sell?

The answer is no.

According to the AECOM/KPMG report on Ontario’s transit revenue tool options, “in looking at the noted peak period hourly lane usage, there is not much capacity in the lanes for additional usage [emphasis mine].”

That’s a problem: a well-used carpool lane is the enemy of a profitable HOT lane.

But the report sees a way around this problem. If the province were to raise the carpooling restriction from two riders per vehicle to three, then most cars would be forced out of the carpool lane. This would free up space that the government can sell to single-rider vehicles.

How many riders would be squeezed out? The AECOM/KPMG report says more than 1,100 vehicles per hour currently use the carpool lanes during peak hours, representing at least 2,200 riders.

After implementation, the report estimates that 83 per cent of carpool lane users will be single-rider vehicles. In the best-case scenario, this will reduce the total number of riders using the lane to 2,000. Most likely, the ridership loss will be much higher.

How can the government relieve congestion if it replaces two-rider vehicles with single-rider vehicles on Ontario's roads, while reducing ridership by more than 200 people per hour?

But relieving congestion is not why proponents like Dachis are pushing so hard for HOT lanes. The real point is to give those who drive alone, and who can afford to pay, the ability to buy their way out of congestion.

And when you re-read Dachis’ Star article, it becomes obvious that carpoolers are not the intended “customer” for HOT lanes.

He says, "The simplest way [for HOT lanes to operate] would be for carpools to access the lanes for free with an opt-in transponder system. Carpooled vehicles would be pre-registered and the driver would just turn on the transponder when using the HOT lane in carpool mode."

Pre-registration? Carpoolers must fill out paperwork before they can drive? How is this “simple”?

Motorists who have never driven on the 407 toll highway already receive too many wrongly issued bills from the private consortium that runs it. Just imagine the bills carpoolers will receive after driving on a privatized HOT lane without pre-registering.

And how much will these transponders cost? The 407 ETR transponders cost $3.25 per month. So much for “free” carpool lanes.

But no matter: HOT schemes exist to serve paying drivers, not carpoolers.

And make no mistake: the system will need lots of paying drivers. Aecom/KPMG estimates the start-up costs of the tolling system to be $715,000 per kilometer, plus $650,000 for a gantry with tolling equipment at each entrance and exit. And there are huge ongoing operational costs as well.

But costs to the public represent opportunities for private contractors and their consultants. Most new HOT schemes are privatized, and unfortunately the government has a poor record where the private sector is concerned, as we have seen with eHealth, ORNGE and Presto.



Will HOT lanes be the government’s next big private-sector misadventure? Can we trust a government that proposes to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in order to put private contractors in charge of “carpool” lanes whose profitability depends on reducing the number of carpoolers?

Enough. I say we spend this money on new transit instead.

Rosario Marchese is the NDPMPP for Trinity-Spadina.

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