I live in Los Angeles, and we have some of the worst traffic in the country. I’ve seen that one reason for carpool lanes is to help traffic congestion, but I don’t understand since it seems traffic could be a lot better if we could all use every lane.
Why do we still use carpool lanes? Wouldn’t it drastically help our traffic to open all lanes?
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YouTuber City Nerd recently made a video going into the upsides and downsides of HOV lanes.
Even creating one more lane magically from nothing would at best have a small, short term improvement, and in the long term would probably make traffic worse, not better.
Comparing a general lane to an HOV lane, that lane is probably carrying more people, and may be moving more cars when the general lanes get congested since it remains free flowing longer. Of course if that’s the case it may be making congestion worse elsewhere by letting more cars get there. In short, it’s complicated and depends a lot on context.
Regardless, both an HOV lane and a general purpose lane are vastly inferior use of space than a transit right of way that could move an order of magnitude more people and could put a serious dent in congestion by not only reducing car usage on that exact route, but around it as well.
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