Picture it: I’m tooling along the freeway and the only other person in the car is young Whatsit Jr., burbling happily away in his infant carseat. (Correctly positioned in the middle of the back seat facing backwards, of course.) Suddenly I notice that there’s a carpool lane, designated for the use of cars with “two or more occupants.” First, is it legal for me to take it? I suspect the answer is yes, but I’m not sure. Second, and more importantly, is it ethical for me to do so? I’m doubtful about this one. There have been several occasions lately when I could have cut ten or more minutes off my drive time by taking the carpool lane, but I felt it was vaguely dishonest to do so when my second person was only 10 weeks old.
Your child IS an occupant. I would take that lane in a hearbeat.
And I wouldn’t feel bad about it either, being that you’re a taxpayer, and you’re taxes built that road.
People try to use this reasoning to get out of tickets all the time. Where I live there are some carpool lanes where you must have at least 3 people in the car and there was one cop with a story about pulling over a pregnant woman in a single occupant car whose reponse was to claim she was carrying twins.
Sorry, Ms W. I have to disagree with my predecessors in this thread. While it is true that your son is a second occupant, the intent of HOV lanes is clearly to reward those persons who choose to ride with someone else instead of driving another car themselves. Children don’t count.
Would you be obeying the letter of the law? Dunno. But you would definitely be violating its spirit.
Yeah, but everyone’s tax dollars went into that road, not just those of the carpoolers. We all can’t use those lanes.
AFAIK, there are no restrictions on who qualifies as an “occupant” other than it must be a living human. So, taking the lane would be legal.
However, your actions would violate the public policy behind the carpool laws (easing traffic congestion and improving air quality by giving an incentive to people to ride together rather than separately).
Since Whatsit, Jr. cannot drive separately, the public policy does not apply to you, and you should be barred from using the carpool lane.
Now that you pointed this out, I am starting a petition to change the law to put a stop to those with less scruples than you. Well, maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.
Since I’m at it, I’ll have the law changed so that any unlicensed driver does not qualify as an “occupant”, and carpool passengers be required to carry drivers licenses and produce them upon demand to officers. So, if you happen to get pulled over for speeding in the carpool lane, your passenger had better be prepared to show a license.
I will also change the law so no passenger qualifies as an “occupant” unless that passenger deliberately chose to carpool in lieu of driving solo when driving separately was a reasonable alternative to carpooling. So, if husband and wife live together, only have one car between them, and are going from home to the movies using a carpool lane, forget it! OK, there may be some enforcement problems here…
OK, upon having read the responses so far, I’m inclined to stick with my initial feeling, which was that it’s slightly dishonest to take the carpool lane when your passenger is someone who can’t actually drive a car. It just subverts the purpose of the carpool lane, in my opinion. It’s not a huge deal, in that I wouldn’t be upset seeing someone else do it; I just feel weird about doing it myself.
To those of you wondering if I don’t have some more weighty and important issue to fill my time with: No, I don’t. I hope you will be able to sleep tonight anyway.
Well, I don’t live in Seattle, but I go there on a fairly regular basis (I’m in Yakima) to visit family and friends. I think what strikes me most about the Carpool Lanes are how empty they are. Feeling very much like a Bumpkin when I first noticed this, I looked around to see how many people in all of that traffic we’re actually just single occupants of their vehicles. It looked like pretty much all of them. Since I drive to Seattle with other friends/family, I’ve always been able to use the Carpool Lanes. I can’t really see it being a problem with you using it as well.
It makes sense to me that the lanes were built to encourage carpooling and going with that. On the other hand when you have that much traffic filled with so little people, there’s some good arguments for using it as well. Less congestion for the single occupant vehicles would be one that comes to mind… “Yeah lady, get your car outta here if you can do it!”
I understand your point, and certainly driving with an infant as the second occupant doesn’t advance the public policy behind the law, but I disagree that it is unethical.
This is a “bright-line rule.” The fact of the matter is that there are innumerable other circumstances in which you can meet the letter of the law but not the spirit - driving in with someone who otherwise would have taken the subway, with someone who otherwise wouldn’t have gone, with someone who doesn’t own a car, etc. The law itself is not perfect and does not purport to be. The law is a compromise, and if you adhere to the terms of the compromise, you are acting ethically.
This topic has been discussed many times in Gary Richards’ “Roadshow” column in the San Jose (California) Mercury News. His column deals with roads, traffic, and transit.
The final conclusion is this: In California, it is absolutely legal to use the carpool lane when the second occupant is an infant. Whether you consider it ethical is a matter of your own personal opinion. But I never heard of case where someone was legally allowed to use the carpool lane, but didn’t for “ethical” reasons!
Sorry, I should have indicated in my above post that it was the legal answer to your question. From an ethical point of view, I dunno. Although from my limited Net-based research, it seems the philosophy behind HOV lanes was originally to enable more bus traffic. So, if you aren’t driving a bus, I guess you’re violating the spirit of the law. When they changed the focus a bit to encourage carpooling, it seems to have opened up the options we’ve been discussing. If I had to make a guess, I’d wager that the lawmakers who designed this law would have no ethical problem with your infant counting as a passenger.
I don’t see any ethical problems with this. The carpool lane is for vehicles with multiple occupants; it doesn’t say anything about the size, age, or driving ability of said occupants.
