Congressmen Bob Franks and Rodney Frelinghuysen convened a hearing Monday to discuss the future of HOV lanes in New Jersey. A Star Ledger campaign has whipped up a movement to open the carpool lanes to general traffic, and many elected officials are riding what they view as a groundswell in favor of dumping the HOV restrictions on I-80 and I-287 for good.

Testimony at the hearing was unsurprising. Senator Lautenberg and several U.S. Representatives testified that it seemed the HOV lanes were not working, and that they should probably be opened to all traffic. NJDOT appeared to back off of press statements made by Governor Whitman's office that had made it look as if Trenton was ready to bolt from the lanes at the first opportunity - NJ Transportation Commissioner John Haley said the state would attempt to make the lanes work, and would determine their future in June, 1999.

The Tri-State Campaign's Janine Bauer said the question facing New Jersey is less that of whether to keep the HOV lanes, but rather "the question is when our state DOT is going to start focusing on reducing traffic and congestion...To date, DOT has done very well at building highways that attract ever-increasing amounts of traffic, and very poorly at managing that traffic or reducing the number of vehicle miles of travel or trips." She said that in the I-80 and I-287 corridors, municipalities needed to recreate a traffic management version of the "ten towns" initiative Somerset and Morris County municipalities organized to reduce water pollution in the Great Swamp. Joint policies and initiatives, undertaken with agencies or TMAs, could include new local transit, land use and zoning changes to make transit more cost-effective; shared parking facilities; maximum instead of minimum parking requirements for new development; and parking "cash-out" policies.

Michael Replogle, director of the Environmental Defense Fund's transportation project, described the "High-Occupancy/Toll" lanes created in recent years in San Diego and in Orange County, CA. He said permitting any vehicle to use the HOV lane for a toll would get at the problem of under-use, while also guaranteeing that the travel capacity represented by the HOT lane would not be overcome by traffic growth. Both NJDOT and critics of highway expansion have warned that if the HOV lanes are turned into new highway lanes, I-287 and I-80 will experience 6-lane gridlock within a few years.

A Federal Highway Administration official reiterated a theme sounded in previous weeks by NJDOT: in contrast to the dismal performance of the I-287 HOV lane, the I-80 HOV lane is working because ... "At the national average vehicle occupancy rate, if the I-80 HOV lane was decommissioned, the same number of people would travel in 1,000 more vehicles. For I-80, all lanes would experience same congestion of the general use lanes today," said FHWA's Dennis Merida.

Even if that is the case, it's difficult to dispute that the I-287 HOV lane appears as if it were designed to fail. NJDOT, with complicity by FHWA and the EPA, built the $143 million HOV lane without any environmental impact study that might have shown what a miserable disaster it would prove to be. When organizations that launched the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, like NJPIRG and EDF tried, through the courts, to require DOT to do those studies, some of the same elected leaders, agencies and newspapers now calling the HOV lane project a complete folly attacked the environmental organizations - as obstructionists trying to delay a useful and badly needed project.

In fact, the I-287 HOV lane was ranked by the agency and elected officials that make up the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority at 9^th out of 9 for highway expansion projects and #104 out of 115 for all FY 95 projects. But NJDOT moved it to #1, and began construction.

Many projects, including important maintenance and reconstruction jobs, scheduled for FY 95 were delayed because of the I-287 HOV.

Environmental laws are sometimes viewed as overly technical or leading to delay. Rather, they are common-sense requirements that say "what are the impacts of a project before you go spending all that money?" "What are we getting?"

Unless some type of rigorous review is put into effect now, to determine under ISTEA's language for decommissioning the HOV lanes what is in the "public interest," we won't even learn anything from government's mistake.