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

Question

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?

In: 406

Answer 1

The only real solution to traffic is automated cars.

The faster we get those on the road and the fewer human driven cars the less traffic problems there will be.

Once automated cars are the only cars, you can actually apply and enforce blanket policies across all cars effectively.