Utah sees wide interest in their I-15 tollway

Toll road news reports:

Toll lanes on Utah's I-15 the main north-south drag through Salt Lake City have got off to a chaotic start with gross underpricing. At a mere $50 for a monthly pass 600 decals sold out in just over an hour Thursday. Sales on the project website began at Aug 10 08:00 with two-thirds sold in the first 10 minutes.

Passes were completely gone at 09:22.

Unknown thousands of frustrated buy-ins to the HOV lanes wasted their time trying to buy passes throughout the day.

UDOT and contractors grossly underestimated public interest in the project. Communications links failed. The project website - expresslanes.utah.gov - was overwhelmed. The website got patched up long enough to sell the available passes but has been down since. When we tried at 09:22 EST today (Friday) it was still down!
Good news is - the strong customer demand

Of course the good news is the strong underlying demand for an express ride, which helps justify the project, and suggests a potential revenue stream which will justify a serious toll system. Free flow has great value to motorists, obviously way more than $50/month.

Time savings in using the express lanes are put at 11 to 20mins per trip. At say 30 trips per month that's 5.5 to 10hrs time savings. The calculations produce a value of time saved of $5 to $9.10/hr. Obviously there are a lot more than 600 people in the southern part of Salt Lake City who value their time more than those numbers!

Drivers in this case save $90 per month in time but only pay $50. As people pay, they want more speed; and that means lane guidance will quickly become standard in all cars. As in:

Middle America speedway. The nation’s fastest area is in the middle part of the country. Seven of the top 15 states with the fastest highways are in that area. The average speeds on roads in Mississippi, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Idaho, Alabama and Missouri exceed 67 m.p.h; the average posted speed limits in those states is 70 m.p.h.

As blogger Elliot found out when analyzing the TomTom Speed profile.

Utah generally gets these things right and maybe Utah will be the first with much faster lane guided speedways.