Carpool cheaters can help fix the carpool lanes in a way similar to HOT toll payers—but at a lower cost
Share to twitterWashington State Patrol Trooper Darryl Tolen writes a ticket for violating an HOV lane restriction to the driver of a single-passenger car at an Interstate 5 on-ramp near Arlington, Wash., July 31, 2008. In many cities, there are carpool or"HOV" lanes which, during rush hour, are only for use by cars with multiple people -- a minimum of 2 or 3. These lanes also exist on bridges and also offer reduced tolls.
To understand why, you must understand the mistake that was made in original carpool lane design. Carpool lanes are of dubious effectiveness at the goal of reducing congestion and improving the throughput of people on the roads. They can often make traffic worse rather than better. Traffic engineers know this, and in most towns, there are now efforts to change carpool lanes into HOT or"Managed" lanes. These lanes act like carpool lanes, but allow solo drivers to pay a toll to use them.
Lanes in a freeway have a capacity of around 2,000 cars/hour. Try to go over that and they"collapse" into heavy traffic, which reduces the capacity and it gets worse until the road opens up again. Sometimes the collapse happens at below full usage, and the lower the usage, the less likely stop-and-go collapse is.
The carpool lane isn't always making it worse. If you have enough to fill an HOV-3 lane, and a decent number of them are induced, you can get a situation where you improved the road capacity. It's very hard to fill a lane with HOV-3, but HOV-3 plus electric cars can do the job. Casual carpools also do this, but more often than not they are taking people off of transit, not out of cars. But the truth is, it still only works some of the time, and other times it is making it worse.
This photo provided by Washington State Patrol shows a Halloween doll buckled up in the passenger seat of a car Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2015, in Tacoma, Wash. During Tuesday's morning commute, a trooper pulled over the man after he tried to use the doll to gain access to the HOV lane of Interstate 5 in Tacoma. This is where the"managed" or"HOT" lane comes in. You let solo drivers into the lane for a fee.
Tolls can be adjusted in real time to react to demand. Cheaters will see the risk as fairly fixed while the lane is moving well. On the other hand, cheats will naturally respond to congestion and leave the lane if it slows down -- there is no point in taking the risk of a ticket if the lane isn't going to move you significantly faster. If the carpool lane clogs up, the cheats will desert it and open it up again.
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