The Gas-Guzzling Carpool Lane
Dear Environmentalists,
If there were ever a movement with its heart in the right place but a slew of half-cocked ideas, it would be yours. I agree that we should protect the earth, but I don’t think burning fossil fuels, throwing up tons of CO2 and creating a toxic sludge to protect a renewable resource and prevent biodegradable waste is all that bright.
But hey, recycle paper if you want to. It’s your right.
No, my question today revolves around yet another one of your mainstays, the HOV lane, AKA: The Carpool lane.
I have to wonder whether or not those of you behind this idea actually thought it all of the way through. Because, thanks to this invention. I am actually using twice the gas, sending up twice the CO2 and generally screwing the environment twice as bad
Don’t believe me, consider the following:
Back and Forth
Until you look at what my wife and I do every day.
My wife works across the river. I work at home. We are a one-car household though both of us have licenses. Theoretically, this should be a no brainer. I toss her the keys, she drives to work and then drives home in the evening. That’s two trips.
But New Orleans has HOV lanes. They are one-way lanes that switch directions at certain hours to go with the flow of traffic. That way, the lanes are always flowing the same direction as rush hour.
If my wife drives herself to work, it takes between 30 and 45 minutes for her to travel one way depending on traffic. However, if I get in the car and drive her, we can take the HOV lanes (there are two of us now, keep up) and we can complete the trip in about 15 minutes. Then, after that, I turn around and go against traffic on the regular Interstate back home. In the evenings, I leave a few minutes before she gets off, go against traffic to pick her up and then we take the HOV lanes back.
That’s four trips, double the miles traveled.
The HOV lane makes it more efficient for us time-wise to waste gas and put out more carbon. So, we’re very grateful for the HOV lanes, there’s nothing better than waking up that precious 15 minutes later, but it seems a bit destructive to the goal, especially if you’re trying to keep cars off of the road.
Just Ain’t Happening
Of course, the concept of the HOV lane is pretty suspect to start with. It assumes that avoiding traffic is enough of a reward to motivate people to ride around with near strangers on a daily basis. Your city has to have a pretty bad traffic problem before that becomes a good trade.
No, HOV lanes, in most places, seem only to draw people who had two people in their car anyway and, if done poorly, can increase congestion by robbing a needed lane or two from ordinary commuters, thus increasing traffic jams and keeping the same cars on the road longer.
It also assumes you have a good HOV system in place, which New Orleans does not. My wife happens to work near one of the off-ramps to the HOV lanes, so it works out well for her. But if you want to go anywhere significantly beyond the river, you need to exit the interstate, drive in surface traffic and then get back on among the non-HOV commuters.
Yes, it’s that stupid.
I’m not naive enough to believe that you can manipulate people’s behavior by offering a token reward. People are creatures of habit and they will do what they’ve always done, wake up, drive to work, put in their eight hours and drive home.
Unless there is a tangible reason to change, it isn’t going to happen.
But with gas prices rising, tangible reason to change might be at hand. However, I don’t think that the HOV lane is going to be the kind of alternative your everyday citizen will be looking for.
Some Real Solutions
If you want a real solution to this problem, I might have one, or at least a better answer: Free, reliable, usable, practical and enjoyable public transit
That’s right, don’t put two people into a car, put 20 of them on a bus or a hundred of them on a train.
Yes, you have to invest in it and, yes, you have to maintain that investment. You have to buy new vehicles, you have to hire competent operators, you have to patrol these vehicles with law enforcement and you have to make sure that they are accessible, by foot, to most residents and that they can get people where they need to go as fast or almost as fast as a car.
Right now public transit, in most cities, is slow, unsafe and, worse yet, people actually have to pay to get on the damn thing. Why on earth would a rational person take a slow, dirty, unsafe bus to get somewhere when driving a car is almost as cheap, faster and safer? Easy, they are too poor to afford a car or too bad of a driver to have a license.
Of course, if you insist on paving lanes for “special” commuters, how about a protected bike lane instead? My wife is a strong cyclist and, with some training, could easily make the distance to work. The only problem is that she can not safely cross the river.
Bikes are carbon neutral, the most common form of transit in the world and ideal for cities, why aren’t you promoting those? Because most people refuse to bike? Well, they refuse to carpool too.
Bottom Line
The key to reducing the number of cars on the road isn’t the buddy system. You’d get more cars off the road if you took out Jay Leno.
They key is a little more complicated than that my friends. We’re going to need some serious urban changes before we reduce the number of cars on the road. Speeding down the HOV lane is fun, I know that well, but it isn’t a motivator to carpool.
It’s just a motivation for lazy people like me to game the system so I can wake up fifteen minutes later and my wife still get to work on time.
Sorry guys, but in terms of practicality, at least in New Orleans, the HOV is DOA.
Comments
Leave a Reply
