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
They don’t. They are an incentive for you to carpool, saving YOU and your passengers time while also being more green.
I studied this for a paper years ago. The numbers I saw for LA in the 80s there were 1.2 persons per vehicle. If that number went up to 1.4 there would be no congestion. Yes that would mean 17% fewer cars.
If traffic is flowing at 60mph with 1 second between each car 3,600 cars per hour can travel per lane. That is fine until someone wants to change lanes, haha. If your carpool lane requires 3 people per car 1,200 cars will carry as many people. Or if there are 10 buses in that hour even more can travel in that lane.
Traffic monitors have a number of cars per lane they expect for free flowing traffic, once they get beyond that they know things will slow down. How many times have you had to come to a dead stop on the freeway, only to see no evidence of a problem when you finally get back to speed? That is due to PMS. Poor Merging Syndrome.
the more lanes you add the more traffic you are going to bring to the road, which in turn just makes congestion that much worse. there is many videos on YouTube that explain this.
what would absolutly help is to bring public transit back into wide spread use
This is made as an incentive to people who carpool. So they can get faster to where they need to be, which motivates them to carpool.
If all people carpooled, then you would reduce the number of cars on roads by 50% or more.
No traffic jams, yay!
I studied this for a paper years ago. The numbers I saw for LA in the 80s there were 1.2 persons per vehicle. If that number went up to 1.4 there would be no congestion. Yes that would mean 17% fewer cars.
If traffic is flowing at 60mph with 1 second between each car 3,600 cars per hour can travel per lane. That is fine until someone wants to change lanes, haha. If your carpool lane requires 3 people per car 1,200 cars will carry as many people. Or if there are 10 buses in that hour even more can travel in that lane.
Traffic monitors have a number of cars per lane they expect for free flowing traffic, once they get beyond that they know things will slow down. How many times have you had to come to a dead stop on the freeway, only to see no evidence of a problem when you finally get back to speed? That is due to PMS. Poor Merging Syndrome.
It doesn’t help with traffic. It helps getting more people to where they are going. Every car that cruises through in the carpool lane has 2-4 times as many people in it as the cars in other lanes.
The only real solution to traffic is automated cars.
The faster we get those on the road and the fewer human driven cars the less traffic problems there will be.
Once automated cars are the only cars, you can actually apply and enforce blanket policies across all cars effectively.
This is a pretty good video explaining traffic and carpool lanes: https://youtu.be/SUxUtl7mcFc
This is a pretty good video explaining traffic and carpool lanes: https://youtu.be/SUxUtl7mcFc
If you take the cars with the highest density of people and let them move the fastest, it increases the throughput of the system.
The goal is to move people, not cars.
Latest Answers