Wasn’t it the pet project of the Bush Administration and specifically a political appointee to USDOT, Tyler Duvall, who like many in the years 2001-2008, got his job due to his ideology and not his experience in the field?

Now that we have had a change of administration, shouldn’t this tolling-the-HOV lanes plan be in the circular file?

I hope you all can really look into, Tyler Duvall, and his complete inexperience in Transportation issues:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/16/AR2008031603085.html

It took a few moments for Tyler Duvall, the top policymaker at the
Department of Transportation, to digest the news from the Hill. But
when he realized what it meant, he was stunned.

Last year, Congress decided not to dictate how the department could
spend its discretionary funds. No earmarks, no strings, no
arm-twisting from lawmakers to direct money to bus systems or other
mass-transit projects in hundreds of communities nationwide.

Duvall and other top department officials were staring at nearly $1
billion. And they knew exactly how to spend it.

They used the money to seed five high-profile experiments, in New
York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami and Seattle, that feature
“congestion pricing” — tolls that increase when traffic is heavy. The
idea is to reduce traffic by discouraging some motorists from driving
during peak hours.

“It’s almost sort of un-American that we should be forced to sit and
be stuck in traffic,” said D.J. Gribbin, the department’s general
counsel and liaison to the White House, who worked closely with Duvall
on the project.

For Gribbin, Duvall and Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, the goal
is not just to combat congestion but to upend the traditional way
transportation projects are funded in this country. They believe that
tolls paid by motorists, not tax dollars, should be used to construct
and maintain roads.

They and other political appointees have spent the latter part of
President Bush’s two terms laboring behind the scenes to shrink the
federal role in road-building and public transportation. They have
also sought to turn highways into commodities that can be sold or
leased to private firms and used by motorists for a price. In Duvall
and Gribbin’s view, unleashing the private sector and introducing
market forces could lead to innovation and more choices for the
public, much as the breakup of AT&T transformed telecommunications.

(snip)

Duvall, 35, is a fourth-generation Washingtonian whose father is a
well-connected lawyer. He had no transportation experience when he was
plucked from his job handling corporate mergers and acquisitions at
Hogan & Hartson and was offered a political appointment at the DOT in
2002. “It was a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing,” he
said.

Within four years, he was setting national policy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/16/AR2008031603085.html