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

It’s an incentive for multiple people to be in just one car rather than several cars on the road. So, that would lower congestion. It also saves the environment by having less cars on the road producing emissions. Whether or not it truly makes an impact is beyond me. But that’s the idea at least.