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

It convinces a lot of people to put more than one person into one car.

Also, if you add another lane, people move over time, build new houses, and build new traffic patterns. If you have a full highway today already more than two lanes in each direction, adding one more lane… eventually fills up just the same, every time.

Extra lanes subsidize – give money to – people building low density houses, like ranch houses spread out whoa across California. Problem is that doesn’t work forever, as it turns out.

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