Originally posted by Chairboy
Mietla, are you seriously that out of touch with reality? The entire idea behind carpool lanes is that they carry less people so that other will be encouraged to carpool.
If they carried the same traffic as the other lanes, then there would be no incentive to carpool. If mass transit or carpooling is faster then lonewolfing it, the theory goes, then it's worth doing.
Exactly, the whole idea is absurd (government at work), as you just illustrated.
Look at it as the alien would. Those earthlings are really weird. When the tarffic is light, they open full capacity of the highway, but as soon as the rush hour approaches, they restrict the overall throughput by 25%. One 33% lane conducts 5% of the load.
And what do all those cars in non-carpool lanes do? Yes, they do produce pollution. Instead of spending 30 minutes driving home, they spend an hour. Not quite a double pollution, but obviously more than if there could use full highway capacity.
I'm not even talking about all the accidend cause by the 40-50 mph speed differencial between carpool and non-carpool lanes and the cross-lane trafiic they produce when carpoolers are trying to get into the carpool lane or leave it.
And don;t even try to convince me that people are actually carpoolong with strangers just to take advantage of the carpool lane. I bet that 90 % or carpoolers just happen to have more than one person, carpool lanes or not.
