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

>but I don’t understand since it seems traffic could be a lot better if we could all use every lane.

Traffic is better if there’s fewer cars on the road.

Carpooling means you can have as little as 1/5 as many cars on the road while transporting the same number of people. Having lanes specifically for that helps to incentivize people actually doing that.

That said, all the literature I’ve read indicates that carpool lanes don’t actually work that well. The solution to traffic getting people out of cars. Which is done by building walkable and bikeable cities and having a robust public transportation system. More lanes doesn’t actually help, mostly because of something called “induced demand”