… but apparently not as many as WSDOT predicted:
At the outset, officials expected 5,000 of state Route 167’s daily 120,000 drivers to move over to the HOT lanes by their second or third year of operation. Two years in, it’s at less than half of that total.
Still, the money raised by the tolls has steadily increased. Drivers took more than 47,000 tolled trips on state Route 167 in March, the most ever and 25 percent more than the same month last year.
At an average of 84 cents a trip, they added nearly $40,000 to state revenues that month.
But running the all-electronic tolling program costs the state about $97,600 a month.
Obviously it would be nice if the lanes were profitable, and it would be doubly nice if that profit were plowed back into transit improvements. But even if it’s losing money, it might still be worth the investment if it were speeding up travel times for the rest of the commuters. So far, though, the results on that score are murky at best.
WSDOT may be about to find out what those of us in the web content business found out a long time ago: there’s a huge psychological difference between “free” and “a tiny amount of money.” Even if its “rational” from a cost-benefit point of view to use the lanes, the idea of paying for certain things (like news, music, or movies on the web) just rubs people the wrong way.
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