Live Q&As

The speed cameras in Montgomery County operate all the time, whether  or not schools are in session.

I've never had any problem with that. Speed limit is the same all the time.

The Virginia Department of Transportation says it sets the weekend direction on the I-95/395 HOV reversible lanes according to what its traffic counts show is the most heavily traveled direction.

They're open to all southbound traffic from 6 p.m. Friday s until 2 p.m. Saturdays. They're open to northbound traffic from 4 p.m. Saturday until 6 a.m. Monday. If you're traveling in the other direction, it's quite likely that traffic will look better on the side with the extra lanes.

There has been talk about going to HOV-3 on I-66, and there's a study about improving overall traffic flow on the Interstate. That may result in plans for putting more buses in the HOV lanes.

Enforcement is very difficult in those lanes, because as you note, they're not separated from the regular traffic by anything other than white lines, making it easy for cheaters and tough for police.

I'd love to see the hybrid exemption go away. There's no justification for it. It was clear in the original legislation that the provision was supposed to go away. But the Virginia General Assembly has routinely extended it for a year in each of its annual sessions.

That doesn't sound like much hope for short-term relief, does it?

Okay, I don't see how both these things could be true: That the HOV lanes on 66 are crowded now, as our previous poster said, and that removing the HOV restriction would make traffic better for everyone on 66.

What am I missing?

I should have mentioned this in my look ahead at the week's traffic and transit issues on the Dr. Gridlock blog. The four locations in Arlington where the red light cameras are in place:

-- Eastbound Lee Highway at North Lynn Street.

-- Southbound  Fort Myer Drive at westbound Lee Highway.

-- Westbound Lee Highway at Washington Boulevard.

-- Northbound North Glebe Road at Fairfax Drive.

As I recall, the traffic studies suggest that rear end collisions may increase at intersections with cameras, but side-impact collisions may decrease. The side-impact collisions are the ones more likely to be serious, personal-injury crashes. The rear-end ones tend to be fender benders.

Yes, that was a bit of a mystery, because the first phase, as explained to us in spring 2009, was supposed to last three months, and instead took a year.

Here's the critical explanation as provided by my colleague, Ashley Halsey III, on The Post's Commuter page of Sunday, June 6:

"The right lane of the bridge has been closed for months, far longer than had been anticipated, because DDOT engineers determined that it wasn't having a huge traffic impact. So, they used it as a staging area for work on the bridge tower, the pilings that support the bridge and painting.

"That lane will reopen as the rest of the work rolls out in seven phases, each expected to last three to five weeks."

The thing I'm worried about for you 14th Street Bridge users is whether you're now having any trouble getting into the correct northbound lane to reach either 14th Street or the Southeast-Southwest Freeway. How's it going?

Sorry that's happened to you. Riders who've shared their experiences with me have generally been satisfied with that particular aspect of the SmarTrip program: the balance transfer part. We may be going through a difficult period right now as Metro personnel convert all the fare equipment for the fare hikes scheduled to take effect on Sunday.

This is a reference to the H Street intersection that now has pedestrian crossing configuration known as a Barnes Dance, or at least a modified Barnes Dance. There's a traffic light cycle in which pedestrians can cross any way they want to.

It should be safer, and traffic should flow better through the intersection, but it really depends on drivers obeying the no turn signs. That's no turns at any time. No rights. No lefts. When I saw it on the first day, I thought the signs probably needed improvement, and that the traffic control officers were going to need to watch over things till people got used to the pattern. But I understand the officers are no longer stationed there. I'll go back and look.

They may have gotten a ride to the Brentwood Yard. A train that gets taken out of service isn't going to make any more stops, just because people stayed on board. Normally, Metro personnel would make repeated announcements over the loudspeakers and flash the lights on the train. If that failed to get a passenger's attention, he or she might notice that everyone else was leaving the train.

Did none of that happen?

I'm all for using technology to catch speeders and red-light runners. I think they're a great untapped source of public revenue.

There's no more variable speed limit on the Beltway near the Wilson Bridge. The funding for that program expired. And I don't recall anyone saying it worked well. Enforcement was the problem, as it so often is with our basic traffic rules.

I think that's a very legitimate question, given Metro's very obvious problems maintaining the trains, tracks and stations we have now. Also, the problem with getting trains through the Rosslyn tunnel remains unresolved.

This is the same problem we have throughout our transportation system: Rails and roads. Governments can't afford to maintain what we've built.

But I don't believe the solution is to shut down rail lines or highways. I think we have to figure out how to finance the maintenance.

That's interesting about the right lane. I wonder if drivers tend to avoid the lane where people are going to be accelerating and decelerating. Might drivers be trying to reach the farthest left lane they can, whether or not they are carpoolers?

Yes, I understand the difficulty that you and other travelers are pointing out about the merging. Separate exits -- or more separate exits than we have now -- would be a good solution. (Though it doesn't seem to help much at the separate left-hand exit from I-66 to the inner loop, does it?)

If those red light cameras work the way they do elsewhere, drivers have to blow the red light clean to get a ticket. But I see drivers everywhere who demonstrate their ability to do that.

Yes, I do believe you're correct on that, and it's a question of enforcement, rather than the law itself.

It's really, really easy to bust the doors on a Metro train. You want those doors to work. You don't want to be riding on a train with malfunctioning doors. If drivers want to be evil, they could do it by jerking the train to a stop. They're not going to get away with the huge disruption of taking their trains out of service for no good reason.

I'm glad to see Congressman Van Hollen and his staff get credit for constituent services. (In case there's any confusion, Van Hollen is not on the Metro board. You can find a list of the board members by following this link: http://www.wmata.com/about_metro/board_of_directors/)

I'm pretty sure that's just volume. Summertime volume. That's the area where VDOT is adding a fourth lane to I-95, and I hope it does some good opening up things. But it's hard to figure a long-term fix to delays on what's both a local Main Street and an East Coast Main Street.

Yep. That was a good story by Eric, highlighting the problem. We could do that one every couple of years.

What happens with the Orange Line just about every morning is that the trains get thrown off schedule as they move through downtown, and they're still off schedule as they turn around and head back in from Vienna. Plus, as you know, there's just a huge number of people trying to get on at those western stations on the Orange Crush.

I'm not sure it's possible to have delays affecting only one station, but I do agree that riders boarding at Court House face a special problem -- and will for the forseeable future. There are more and more people trying to get on there, and the trains arriving are getting more and more crowded.

It was, back when people weren't buying hybrids. That issue hasn't existed for years. There's no need for local governments to encourage the purchase of hybrids.

It would be very convenient for airport travelers. But this won't happen: There's no easy way to move an inbound train from the Orange Line tracks to the Blue Line tracks at Rosslyn Station. It would take a major, very expensive reconstruction for the benefit of a relative handful of travelers. In this case, it's better to have the passengers switch trains.

By the way, the new line's tracks will join up with the existing system between East and West Falls Church, but the trains on the new line will continue on to Stadium-Armory Station before turning back. So someday, if you are coming in from Dulles Airport and want to get to Reagan National, you'd switch trains either at Rosslyn or at L'Enfant Plaza.

I see a couple of comments criticizing the air conditioning. There are always some cars with busted A/C. Move out of them at the next stop, because the next car might have working  air conditioning. And report the problem to the train operator over the intercom or use the complaint form on Metro's Web site.

That said, it's sometimes tough to tell on these 90 degree days whether the air conditioning is really working. The doors are opening all the time. And if the train just entered service, the air conditioning might be having a limited effect.

Thanks for the field report. I do think the traffic control officers can help get drivers through the early stages of these road changes. DDOT is going to have to keep a sharp eye on this major change, creating a virtual traffic circle around the Wendy's restaurant. That's a confusing area to begin with.

But one thing the engineers know is that the regulars tend to get used to a change in a couple of weeks. My guess is that they'll have that in mind and won't make any drastic adjustment till things have a chance to settle down.

I think the benefits administrators and the employees have access to that information right now. It's more an issue of the long lead-time the benefits people and employees need to make the adjustments. It's very, very unlikely that the Metro board is going to make any further changes in the basic fare structure it established last month, even though it must still give final approval to the plan this Thursday.

I've mentioned this quite frequently since the transfer time reduction was proposed in January. A letter-writer to my column pointed out that it's important to riders in the suburbs, where there's a longer gap between buses than in the central area. Still, I thought that a reduction from three hours to two hours in the transfer time window was valid.

Many, many riders share your frustration. But manual control of the trains, and pulling to the front of the platform, is likely to continue through this year. We don't even have a cause for the June 22, 2009, crash yet. Whatever the NTSB tells Metro, Metro will need time to implement the recommendations and test any new equipment or software before returning to automatic control.

The first of the four "spot improvements" that will widen four sections of I-66 westbound inside the Beltway is just getting underway. They are controversial, but it's really lack of money that is slowing down the program. Virginia doesn't have much money to make any highway improvements. In fact, as I noted earlier, there's not enough money to properly maintain the existing road network.

I'll talk more about this on the Dr. Gridlock blog this week, but one place you can figure out the impact on your ride is on our fare calculator:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/metro/metro-fare-calculator/

Another think you can do is use the Trip Planner on Metro's home page. If you enter a trip date after June 27, when the new fares take effect, it will calculate the trip based on the new fare.

There's definitely that downside to electronic enforcement: Officers pick up a lot of other violations when they stop speeders and red light runners. But violations of basic traffic rules have become so flagrant that officers need all the help they can get. I hope the four cameras in Arlington are just a start.

You should be find on that Fourth of July getaway plan. Generally, the Fourth of July and the Labor Day getaways aren't our big traffic problems. So many people already have gotten away.

But thanks for the reminder about the upcoming holiday. I'd better start posting some information for it on the Dr. Gridlock blog. What I usually do around the holidays is post what I know and ask travelers to share their tips.

What I'm saying is that the HOT lane operators will have a clear financial stake in keeping freeloaders out of the express lanes. That profit motive could very well work to the benefit of the legitimate drivers using those lanes. Users of the HOV lanes across the region might well wish there were such an incentive to enforce the current rules.

Fluor-Transurban will sign a contract with the state police to cover the cost of enforcement. There's no reason that should reduce other state police services in Northern Virginia when the HOT lanes open in 2013

A lot of the air-cooling equipment in the downtown stations is pretty old now. When it breaks down, it can take a long time to fix. Last year, I went around with a thermometer and recorded the temps in various stations. There was quite a range. I'll probably do the same this summer -- if I can find that thermometer.