Don't hold your breath — toll lanes are unlikely in Bay Area tunnels
Q As a kid, I repeatedly tried holding my breath all the way through the Waldo Tunnel. I never made it. Dang 55 mph speed limit. Happily, I found yelling out the window all the way through way more fun!
These tunnels are just sitting there: Devil's Slide, Robin Williams, Caldecott, the connector between Highway 92 and Interstate 280, and the Yerba Buena tunnel in the middle of the Bay Bridge. Anyone can drive through and scream in the tunnel, free of charge. With many things getting more expensive, how long before the tunnel tolls for me?
— Jed Gnam, Napa
A There is no discussion about tunnel tolls now. No one knows if it would occur in the future. What other tricks did you try as a kid to speed up a trip?
Q Last December I saw what I-5 could be by driving I-95 from Miami to Savannah. The two distinguishing features of I-95 were a minimum of three lanes, and trucks that travel at the same speed as cars. People on the East Coast call it Die95, but I found it a real pleasure to drive, compared to I-5. One frustration with I-5 is that it's pretty much impossible to drive the speed limit, as the slow lane is going 55, and the fast lane is going 85, so while I normally find speeding to be pointless on I-5, I find it safest to just run with the bulls until I see a good break in the slow lane.
But that said, on I-95, the three-lane dynamic did not work the way I expected. The very few trucks that wanted to do something closer to 55-60 would park themselves in the slow lane, but to my surprise, the trucks going the speed limit (65-70), which was probably 95 percent of the truck traffic, would instead park themselves in the middle lane. I realized that this was super clever, as it got them out of the impact zone, so they could just set their cruise control and enjoy the ride. As a car driver, I took advantage of this by using the adaptive cruise control on my rental to just set myself a comfortable distance behind one of these trucks. This allowed me to, also, just relax and enjoy the ride. It was great. Because there were so few cars in lane three, it made me more convinced than ever that simply having a uniform speed limit would improve I-5 greatly. At a minimum, it would allow drivers like me to safely drive the speed limit.
A It would be nice if California turned I-5 into a freeway that worked as well as I-95 did on your drive.