I take this HOV lane every time I drive into Hartford. The only issues I have are when I get stuck behind a Greyhound/Megabus/Lucky Star bus, going slower than the other traffic. The other issue I have is that when traffic is slow/stopped in the regular lanes, people don't think twice about flying over the buffer pavement into the HOV lane, completely ruining the benefit to people using it correctly.
Rumble strip or a few of those collapsible stand-up reflectors in the median deters the illegal activity well enough. And I think for backups 1 or two lane-change opportunities en route would probably be appropriate. But bending too much for people exceeding the speed limit isn't too wise an idea. Rush hour is when it works best, so doing constant 55 in the HOV is a whole lot better than 35 stop-and-go if more people could wrap brain about that being an option.
I agree, though, about BRT. CTTransit has 2 express bus routes each on the 91 and 84 HOV's, but the headways are pretty pathetic and don't put a dent in the need. They've pretty much blown 20 years of opportunity to take advantage of it meaningfully. Now the 91 express routes are only a few years away from becoming pretty useless when full commuter rail goes online in 2016 with 1-per-town station stops everywhere north and south. Where HOV's would've made the biggest difference are Farmington-Hartford between Route 9 and the bus station exit, but they nixed that entire idea in 'favor' of quite possibly the worst single transportation project in the nation--the billion-dollar Hartford-New Britain Busway--instead. Which is seeing the projected traffic Level of Service on every intersecting road of the route decrease with every ham-fisted design revision. To point where it's not far off from making everything WORSE than before on the corridor because of how many roads it's screwing up and how much the headways and ridership keep getting revised down.
But I'm not sure HOV's inherently are a solution. Because in Hartford's case, both the 91 and 84 ones are ripe for commuter rail cannibalization. They're still considering a future Hartford-Waterbury route, albeit with longer detour because of the stupid busway and probably 15-year delay because of the busway $$$ drain. And Hartford-east out to about where the HOV lanes start on the Vernon/Manchester line has a truncated former intercity line next to it that would make for a fast 4-stop train trip, especially if they did DMU's or something. There much need for HOV buses if they cover both the E/W and N/S crosshairs with fixed transit on their equivalent of the 128 region? After all, the highways were built next to the old intercity routes for a reason.
Lesson, as always, is that good movement inside the metro area is only possible with multimodal planning. Hartford's its miniature example. We're the one where rapid-transit on twice as many spokes is required. We've known this since
1945. Not like dragging feet for two-thirds a century and hoping for a different result has miraculously made the problem go away. There's only so much you can do to asphalt when it's 100% maxed out and has no margin for error.
They know this. They always have. It's not sway of the car lobby, it's denial that a magic bullet isn't a magic bullet.
