DC's Massive New Transportation Experiment Starts Tomorrow

Early Saturday morning, the Virginia Department of Transportation will open 14 freshly paved miles of highway on the I-495 Washington Beltway unlike anything drivers in the area have ever seen. The road-widening project has been a decade in the making. And it will constitute, VDOT Secretary Sean T. Connaughton boasted earlier this week, “a high-tech wonder,” the latest and one of the country’s largest attempts at a new generation of highway infrastructure – and a new model of paying for it – that could turn up in cities far from the capital.

The expanded roadway – two lanes in each direction, from the I-95 interchange to Tysons Corner – will be made of High-Occupancy Tolls, or HOT lanes. Carpools of three or more, buses and motorcycles (but not hybrids) can drive them for free. Anyone else who wants in will have to pony up according to a dynamic pricing scheme, and there’s no limit to what that could cost.