Your thoughts about carpool lanes?
Are carpool lanes useless? I don't think they aliviate any traffic, I think they make it worse. Example: I drive from San Mateo to Milpitas every day and carpool lane in 101 goes empty while other lanes are very pack. Same with 237, 30% of the freeway capacity assigned to carpool lane and that lane goes empty most of times. I was hearing radio today and carpool lanes in Livermore and those areas, didn't fix the congestion, made it worse and carpool lines too expensive. Drivers with no stickers pay 5-7 dlls for 10 miles. Government failure?
Depends on how you are looking at it. They are there to push more people into carpooling instead of driving individual cars. What it does is reduce the total number of vehicles on the road especially during rush hours. But again, if the public wants to drive individual cars, the whole purpose of these lanes is out to lurch.
Have they succeeded?
Yes. People wouldn’t carpool if they were stuck in the same stop and go traffic. If you want to drive solo in the carpool lane buy a car with HOV stickers. I picked up a CNG vehicle for $5K as my daily commuter when I had a driving commute.
This may be area dependent... but given what they’re meant to promote, I think they achieve, obviously not completely, but they do encourage a positive behavior. Imagine if every car on the road that currently has just the driver had at least another person, you’d cut congestion & emissions in half... if anything, it’s not encouraging this behavior enough
HOV lanes are good, otherwise the buses would be stuck in traffic, too
Carpool lanes in the south bay are packed bumper-to-bumper with electric cars. Aren’t making a difference either way.
As a parent, carpool lanes are great for my wife! Plus when I carpool to work on get to skip past traffic!
At least you have carpool lanes. I drive from San Mateo to Millbrae every day and that drive is brutal every day.
By now they are. I don't mind separate lanes for public transport, but carpool stickers and rebates for expensive cars doesn't really solve anything.
They aren’t useless. Buy a car with HOV stickers if you want to drive solo in them. Back when I commuted, I bought a CNG car for $5K. CNG was half the price of gas, and I sold it for $6K to someone in LA when I changed jobs.
What you say is "government failure" is a deliberate effort to impose an agenda of public transit and carpooling. They have no interest in making your commute more pleasant, because that would hurt their case that solo vehicles are bad. There's also evidence that says lanes will get filled if they're available, so the carpool lane may be mostly empty today, but if it was open to all traffic, would just be congested like the rest. Whether throughput would be better is a different question.
I think you should go and see smarter ppl in Texas where they can adjust the numbers of lanes in freeway according time of the day. They assign 5 lanes in morning to one direction of freeway and in afternoon they give the 5 lanes to the return. That at least I can acknowledge is a good try. If is not the government who needs to be smarter who?
That Texas model is not possible in Bay Area. All major freeways are packed in all directions.