Eli5 How are carpool lanes supposed to help traffic? It seems like having another lane open to everyone would make things better?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

Citynerd made a video on HOV lanes literally this week: [https://youtu.be/3FYeebu0S4c](https://youtu.be/3FYeebu0S4c)

Re: your question – if the HOV lane leads to a pinch point, switching to a regular lane doesn’t help you reach the destination faster – at best, you get extra space for jammed cars, so the jam doesn’t spill back as far back/as quickly.

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