HOV Lanes

Todd Zywicki is posting about HOV lanes over at The Volokh Conspiracy. Zywicki suggests that these lanes should simply have higher tolls and anyone should be able to ride them.

I think that High Occupancy Vehicle lanes are about the smartest innovation in traffic management in the last twenty years. Then someone decided to let anyone with a hybrid car ride in them. That person should be shot. Or beaten. Better yet, beaten then shot. Being shot then beaten would probably be counter productive.

The whole point behind HOV is that putting multiple people in a car increases the population density on the highway while reducing the vehicle traffic density. The great thing is that these effects reinforce each other synergisticly. Lowering the traffic density means that while the regular lanes have ground to a halt because of over-capacity, the HOV lanes are still moving steadily. So if you look at the number of people moving down a stretch of highway in a minute, the HOV beats the regular lanes by an even wider margin.

Then some idiot decided they should promote hybrid cars by letting them use the HOV lanes. Now we have a ton of people driving hybrids in order to use the HOV lanes without picking up slugs. This means that the population density is dropping and the traffic density is rising. Everything hits capacity again and HOV grinds to a halt just like the regular lanes. All HOV gets you is more people in your car (or not) to share in your discomfort. The last time I went through DC this was the case south on 395.

What's worse it isn't even smart from the ecological perspective. Hybrid cars get around twice the highway mileage of a typical commuter (50-60mpg compared to 20-35ish). But the hybrids will probably only contain the driver, while the standard cars will have 3 or 4 people in them. So per commuter, the standard cars will pollute less. Since the number of commuters will remain relatively constant, pushing hybrids actually increases commuter air pollution. Idiots...