Alright, I have heard the pumped up statistics on both sides of this debate, all the self-serving arguments from the “Green” movement as well as the “Conservative” element. So what’s the deal, do HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle - carpool) lanes make traffic better or worse when installed? Are they worth the cost?
Are there any cases where HOV lanes have been removed, what was the effect? I pesonally have been able to use them in the past, but it does take a bit of coordination with another human being, as well as snipping the umbilical cord with one’s own vehicle. In the SF Bay Area, motorcycles, electric, and hybrid vehicles can use them with only the driver. What is the agenda? I am not against them, but are they doing what they are expected to do? Dopers, please help me understand the “real” story.
sometimes they work sometimes they don’t. in NJ (rt78? not sure) they removed the hov lanes because noone used them. on long island the LIE is theonly road w/ them, at first there could be a total jam and no one in the hov lanes, but more cars are using them. the idea was if 2 or more people are in a car that is on less car on the road, but I use them only when i would have 2 people anyway. I don’t look for an extra person so I can use the hov lane - which kinda defeets the point of them. I personally like to see more local and express lanes with experss lanes not having many entrances and exits so if you get on the express lane, you can’t just go 1 or 2 exits.
harrmill asked: *So what’s the deal, do HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle - carpool) lanes make traffic better or worse when installed? Are they worth the cost? *
What the hell, I just got out of another sluggin’ transit-alternatives debate thread, I’ll jump right into this one. I found a report from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, which, although it is obviously in favor of reducing automobile traffic, does a lot of transit policy consulting for municipalities, so I’m hoping its information is fairly reliable. (Actually, I guess everybody is in favor of reducing automobile traffic, or at least the problems of automobile traffic, so it doesn’t necessarily make you a wild-eyed green freak.) The report (which doesn’t have citations in the HTML, but the site offers downloadable versions that do) talks not about HOV lanes in particular but about HOV approaches as a whole (vanpools, carpools, reserved lanes, etc.):
So it sounds as though your HOV lanes would really have to move traffic along quite a bit faster than the other lanes to attract more users. Let’s see, suppose as a frinstance that you drive 20 miles to work on a crowded highway and it takes you 40 minutes; according to this report, you would not be likely to think it was worth the bother of finding a HOV partner unless it could cut your trip down under 30 minutes. So the slow lanes are going 30 mph and the HOV lane is moving over 40. Is that a reasonable scenario in your experience of them?
Personally, I would think that HOV lanes would be a tricky kind of congestion reduction, because they could wipe themselves out by succeeding: if lots of people go HOV then the HOV lane is just as crowded as the others. Plus, isn’t it somewhat difficult and expensive to police them for violations? I imagine they wouldn’t really inspire drivers to deliberately snip that umbilical cord except on really choked roads like the Long Island Expressway that k2dave mentioned. I bet that lower parking availability or higher parking fees would inspire more carpooling than HOV lanes do; a small stick generally seems more effective than a small carrot.
HOV lanes, called “Diamond Lanes” here in California because they’re marked with a diamond-shaped outline, have become the target of local KSFO radio broadcaster Geoff Metcalf. He is convinced they are bad for the economy and an infringement on the voting public’s rights.
Geoff Metcalf is also an extreme right-winger who likes to toot his own horn, rather like Rush Limbaugh. He tried to start a “grass roots” movement to get a pro-gun initiative and a pro-gun referendum on the ballot, but both of these efforts fell so far short of the minimum number of signatures required that you really have to wonder just how grass-roots this grass-roots movement is. My guess is it’s the first stage of Metcalf’s bid for Governor of California.
They’re no longer officially called “Diamond Lanes”, largely due to the failed experiment in the early/mid 80s with the Santa Monica Freeway (Interstate 10 in Los Angeles), where a regular lane on the freeway was converted to a HOV lane. It was loudly and proudly called the “Diamond Lane”…and it was an abysmal failure.
Well, they’re no longer “officially” called diamond lanes, but everyone here still calls them that anyway (at least in S. Cal, I don’t know about you northerners).
To address the OP, I hate carpool lanes.
I started a thread about this very subject a couple of months ago (too lazy to find it), and in it, I professed my disgust with them.
They cater to a minority, meanwhile, the greater whole suffers. That was basically my argument. Maybe I’ll go into it in more detail after I take a nap.
The solution I have seen to this “problem” is that they up the number of riders you have to have to qualify for the HOV lane. This results in a pattern where the objective becomes to limit use of a traffic lane (in effect blocking traffic flow rather than easing it) rather than to encourage carpooling.
I don’t think they work, because they treat the symptom and not the disease. To treat the disease requires city planning (zoning so that people can get to services near their homes rather than having to drive) and adequate alternative transportation infrastructure.
Also I understand that recent studies have shown that after a population reaches a certain density, adding lanes of traffic actually promotes congestion instead of alleviating it, because it over-centralizes. The only real alternative being other forms of transportation, rezoning, etc.
The principle is that by reserving lanes for long-distance (“express” traffic), you prevent congestion near exist, restricting traffic near exits to cars entering and exiting the freeway. Merges go more cleanly and efficiently, etc. In practice, at least in my experience on I-271 in Cleveland and on I-270 in Maryland, is that they get just as congested, with the added bonus of needing resurfaced more frequently.
They don’t go unused, but don’t have a terrible lot of traffic on them, except when there is a traffic jam, when they become a way for people who don’t care about a $200 ticket to skip ahead of everyone else.
You can REALLY piss people off by getting in one and driving the minimum speed limit - people tend to think of them as lanes made for speeding. You can get off of them between the designated exits, but you have to cross two solid white lines and some smallish city-titties and risk getting a ticket if a cop sees it.
Of course, I-271 has a double whammy.
There are only two express lanes each direction, so as soon as some twit tries to pass a semi at a 3-foot-per-hour greater speed, the lane jams up with no way to pass them.
The entire express section from S.R. 91 in the North to U.S. 422 in the south has no concrete except for bridges. It is all asphalt and stone. (I’ve never seen a major highway built with no concrete before.)
In its defense, I drove I-271 from U.S. 422 to I-90 for 14 years and traffic did improve after the express lanes were completed. Of course, going from three lanes per direction to five lanes per direction might have had something to do with that.
I would like to see more studies. I can only speak from personall experience. Most people I know in the Bay Area like them. It takes 1.5 hours to get to SF from Richmond. With a carpool lane I get there in 30 minutes. All I have to do is add an extra person, plus I don’t have to pay a $2 bridge toll. If they got rid of the lane traffic wouldn’t improve that much. But, that’s just my opinions.
There’s this one stretch of Interstate 80 near Berkeley where the carpool lane requires 3 or more people in your vehicle, instead of just 2. They obviously did that because there were “too many” vehicles on the road that already had 2 people in them, so traffic in a 2-or-more-per-vehicle carpool lane would’ve been just as slow as traffic in the other lanes.
By the way, I’m in the bay area too, and I don’t like carpool lanes.
I think building HOV lanes is the only politically survivable way to expand the lanes on highways nowadays. Instead of “we must impose eminent domain and push some people out of the way so that we can put two more lanes on this congested highway”, its “we must impose eminent domain and push some people out of the way so that we can make the environment better by having inventives for fewer but car-pooled vehicles on the road”. Of course, everyone knows that a few years from now, when the traffic in the non-HOV lanes get so way too congested anyway (incentives - bah humbug!), there will a big cry to open up the HOV lanes…job done! Local press…pay attention, there will be a lead story for you to pick up on in the very near future to whip up a frenzy!
Actually, I think one of the easiest ways to lessen the congestion is to INCREASE the speed limit (where its possibile of course), or even post minimum speed limit by lane! The bottle neck is the flow rate, not the flow.
Um … how will increasing the speed limit help when the traffic is backed up bumper-to-bumper? Nobody can go faster than about 20 mph under those circumstances.
I propose special half-width motorcycle-only lanes. You’ll get two lanes for the real estate price and building/maintenance cost of one.
If you have 5 westbound lanes of interstate, and one is a HOV lane, 20% of the highway is HOV. Assuming all cars on the regular interstate have 1 person, and all cars on the HOV have 2 people, then 10% of total traffic would have to be on the HOV just to break even. Now that I’ve written this I think I made a mistake. Should it be 5% of total traffic to break even? Anyway, I don’t live in a city large enough to have HOV lanes, but everytime i’ve seen them they look mostly empty.
How this for a traffic reducing measure…
Lets pass a federal law requiring all interstate shipping to be done on trains, thus freeing up the space taken up by those 18 wheelers.
This helps clear the interstates but goods still need to be hauled locally. This idea wouldn’t lessen rush hour traffic.
I don’t see how an HOV lane, or any express lane for that matter, ease traffic more than just adding on more lanes does. But HOV lanes are intended not just to lessen traffic but also to conserve fuel. I think tracer’s cycle lanes idea has some merit, but I don’t see people here in Pittsburgh using them much in the winter.
“Um … how will increasing the speed limit help when the traffic is backed up bumper-to-bumper? Nobody can go faster than about 20 mph under those circumstances.”
From what I can see, a lot of times, outside of the flatlands I suppose, all it takes is one driver not paying attention and NOT maintining speed in the lane even as the highway goes slightly uphill, thus slowing down and causing a chain reaction whereby all cars following must also slow down…etc. -> congestion. The idea is to try to prevent slowdowns in the first place. Some highways even post “MAINTAIN SPEED” on upgrades to try to make drivers pay attention to their (slowing) speed. MOVE OVER!