Metro pulls plug on $6M HOV satefy system

Here's something you might never have realized: In 2005, Metro paid $6 million for a unique safety system designed to keep people from entering HOV lanes headed in the wrong direction. The system had two lines of defense: First, traditional red-and-white barricade arms that would signal when a lane was closed in a particular direction, and second, guillotine-like devices that straddled the lanes and would lower nets to catch cars going the wrong way. It's an interesting concept, though the whole net thing sounds a little too Wile E. Coyote to be true — and it seems the Metro system didn't work out much better than most of those Acme contraptions in the cartoons. As KHOU reports, Metro has pulled the plug on the safety system just a year and a half after it was installed.

Metro police chief Tom Lambert told Channel 11 that the agency has logged 193 problems with the system since it was installed, and in February, three of the five arm-and-net devices finally malfunctioned. The manufacturer, B&B Electronics, told KHOU that the problems were all news to the company and that the installer or another contractor was at fault. But Lambert said the problems were just too difficult to deal with: "Some of the gates were hit and damaged. You couldn't get replacement controllers for that. Some of the nets were knocked down; very hard to get replacement for that," he said. "So that's the type of problems we were seeing with this."

Which brings to mind one question: Why? If you install barricade arms and giant nets on freeways, you have to assume that they're going to get broken: Houston drivers are intrepid enough not to let such things slow them down. And what's up with a system for which replacement parts aren't available? We're no transportation consultants, but whole thing just doesn't seem to add up. Whatever the case, it looks like Metro's back to the old traffic-cone-and-gate system of preventing HOV chaos — effective, maybe, but not nearly as much fun as watching a car get caught in an enormous net.