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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I think it’s to reward people for taking a car together.
Thought being if two people are in one car then they are not driving two different cars.
Just add more pavement is terrible for the environment. Bigger isn’t always better, eventually you gotta build upward but even that has limits. Ideally you would have a system that collected an efficient amount of people and dropped them off at the location they need instead of each individual relying upon themselves. We can come together and join hands and ride a bus, train, car pools, trams, trolleys where one vehicle would remove many individual needs of a car and all the money need to maintain the car plus emergency money for repairs or accident where keys get locked inside….
Sadly many areas would need some smart people to come up with a logistics to solve it. Who has time for that?
>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”
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.
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.
I lived in SD for a year, all the lanes in the world won’t help you drivers.
More lanes don’t relieve congestion. Study shows it actually makes it worse. More lanes means more people take that road, condensing all the traffic that would normally be dispersed.
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Look up induced demand. Adding lanes does not solve traffic and usually makes things worse in the long run . Look at cities where they just constantly add lanes instead of promoting public transit, they have horrid traffic with massive highways. LA is one of the cities where they constantly add more lanes, does it help?
Examples of such are the Katy freeway and the 401 in Canada.
Ps I realize I misread the post but my response is still valid in the sense that you want to promote more efficient lane usage before letting people go ham on them
In some places there are formal or informal systems in which drivers pick up people without cars in order to use the carpool lane and get to work faster. Generally however they just don’t succeed in taking cars off the road.
It seems kinda counterintuitive but more lanes usually doesn’t mean less traffic.
It usually means just more cars stuck in traffic.
Carpool lanes are there to encourage multiple people taking 1 car
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