Ounced Now with no hands!

I saw this coming even before they opened the lanes.

Yeah, me thats who.

Bay Bridge FasTrak stuck in the slow lane
Phillip Matier,Andrew Ross

Monday, September 17, 2007
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/17/BAVDS6EFO.DTL

When it comes to rush hour on the Bay Bridge, FasTrak isn’t very fast anymore.

In fact, on many mornings, the backup in the supposedly speedy new FasTrak lanes is worse than in the regular cash lanes.

The problem has become startlingly apparent ever since the Labor Day lane reconfigurations that grouped users of the FasTrak transponders in the middle of the toll plaza. The reason for the snail’s pace appears to be threefold:

– For starters, thanks to an aggressive sales effort by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission - which promised swifter commutes for FasTrak users - there has been a 4,000-a-day jump in the number of drivers this year using the automatic toll collectors on the Bay Bridge.

– Second, thanks to the new, longer FasTrak-dedicated lanes, FasTrak-ers who used to be mixed with regular traffic are now lining up much earlier than before.

– The biggest problem, however, appears to the bridge’s metering lights, a few hundred yards past the tollbooths.

The lights are set to control the flow of traffic from the tollbooths to the start of the bridge, and flash to red when traffic gets heavy.

And when the metering lights go on, everyone - whether FasTrak-er or cash-payer - grinds to a frustrating crawl.

“The metering lights determine everyone’s fate,” said Metropolitan Transportation Commission spokesman Randy Rentschler.

And the fate of the metering lights is in the hands of Caltrans, which runs the bridge.

There have been suggestions that the lights for FasTrak users be speeded up. But that doesn’t appear to be at the top of Caltrans’ agenda.

“First of all, the software isn’t available to change the metering lights,” said Caltrans spokeswoman Lauren Wonder.

Even if the software were available, Caltrans might not want to plug it in.

“You have to think about safety,” Wonder said. “You will still have 22 lanes that have to merge down into five, so there is still going to be a problem.”

From Caltrans’ perspective, the main thing is to keep traffic moving smoothly on the bridge. And from that point of view, everything is working just fine.

“Actually,” Wonder said, “the flow on the bridge has improved.”

I call BS.