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

If you reduce the number of vehicles on the road, you reduce the amount of traffic.

As an incentive to try and stop single-rider vehicles, the car pool lanes allow multiple-rider vehicles.