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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In order for the carpool lane to be effective at encouraging multiple people to pile in one car, reducing congestion, pollution, etc, people have to go out of their way and make a decision to pile in one car, for the express purpose of being able to use a carpool lane. And I don’t think that happens as much as some well-meaning people think it does.
In other words, there has to be multiple people who WERE PLANNING TO drive separate cars to the same area, and then DECIDED AFTERWARDS to all go in one car, just to do the carpool lane. The carpool lane would get credit for actually changing something in this case.
But, if 4 people were, for example, all going to go a restaurant together anyway, then they cannot be counted as changing their driving behavior because of the carpool lane. They were going to ride together anyway, the carpool lane meant nothing. Then you have many people driving to work everyday, and they are the only person they know who 1) lives near them, 2) works near them, and 3) wants to carpool with them, which may be pretty rare, so all those people drive alone.
The carpool lane cannot be credited for getting these people to reduce traffic in these situations, even if they use the carpool lane. They didn’t change their behavior, congestion was not affected, and pollution is the same.
I would argue that the number of people who actually change their driving habits and get multiple people in one car for the express purpose of using the carpool lane is probably not very high.
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!
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.
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Pretty simple concept. If people are carpooling there are les cars on the road so having a dedicated lane as a reward makes it incentivize.
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.
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Pretty simple concept. If people are carpooling there are les cars on the road so having a dedicated lane as a reward makes it incentivize.
Some results from actual studies:
> A 2006 report found that METRO’s HOV lanes (consisting of 113 miles at the time) handled almost 118,000 person trips each weekday, by serving about 36,400 multi-occupant vehicle trips. The report found that the HOV lanes had lower average travel times than adjacent corridors and saved the average commuter 12–22 minutes per trip.
https://www.transportation.gov/mission/health/High-Occupancy-Vehicle-Lanes
> Evidence indicates that the carrying capacity on Onewa Road increased in both the
transit lane and the general traffic lane, while the transit lane patronage on buses
dramatically increased, as did the HOVs’ use of the lane. As such, the transit lane
carried 68 percent of all commuters in 27 percent of all vehicles on Onewa Road
(Murray, 2003).
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/projects/ramp-signals/Priority-Lanes.pdf
[This paper](https://www.witpress.com/Secure/elibrary/papers/UT06/UT06019FU1.pdf) has an extended list of successes and problems. Enforcement has historically been one of the bigger problems, but technology is starting to solve that.
YouTuber City Nerd recently made a video going into the upsides and downsides of HOV lanes.
Even creating one more lane magically from nothing would at best have a small, short term improvement, and in the long term would probably make traffic worse, not better.
Comparing a general lane to an HOV lane, that lane is probably carrying more people, and may be moving more cars when the general lanes get congested since it remains free flowing longer. Of course if that’s the case it may be making congestion worse elsewhere by letting more cars get there. In short, it’s complicated and depends a lot on context.
Regardless, both an HOV lane and a general purpose lane are vastly inferior use of space than a transit right of way that could move an order of magnitude more people and could put a serious dent in congestion by not only reducing car usage on that exact route, but around it as well.
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