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

There’s usually fewer cars in the carpool lane, so people using it get a better commute. The people carpooling are in one car instead of 2-5 cars, so there’s fewer cars in all lanes now, and everyone else gets a slightly better commute.