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

Some people have mentioned it encourages carpooling, but the real reason is that it makes traffic worse, which over time will encourage people to take alternative methods of transport

If you build more lanes, travel times reduce, so less people carpool, so traffic increases, so travel times worsen, often worse than before

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