Moof said:
HOV lanes have a self-conflicting logic.
1) Take away a lane from a congested highway.
2) Let 2+ occupancy vehicles use the lane. These cars will ONLY want to use this lane if traffic is congested.
3) Profit, all the double occupancy vehicles will cause a reduction in congestion. If HOV lanes succeed in reducing congestion they will eliminate their own incentive.
Raise gas taxes to European levels and people will be motivated to lose the hummers, carpool, and to live closer to their jobs. Use the tax money to build enough lanes for the actual traffic levels, not the traffic levels that you wish existed based on some fairy tale.
You accurately point out that HOV lanes, when successful, encourage people to drive more (by reducing congestion). It's counter-intuitive, but congestion reduces pollution. Not because cars idling in stop-and-go traffic are efficient, they're not. It's because when driving is a pain, people are more likely to forgo a trip or combine it with another one, reducing VMT.
The answer to the HOV 'problem' is to continue to reduce the number of lanes that are non-HOV, to keep congestion at a near-constant level. Naturally, the public doesn't like this, even though most people by now have figured out that you can't build your way out of congestion; we tried that for 80+ years, and failed. As one study that looked at hundreds of projects showed, on average a 10% increase in lane miles causes an immediate 4% increase in VMT, with the entire new capacity eaten up within a few years. In many cases, by the time a new freeway project has opened, sprawl development based on the _prospect_ of that freeway means that it's already as congested as it was before it was built.
Anyway, when reducing freeway lanes you can either remove non-HOV lanes entirely, or convert the excess lanes for bus or rail transit; many freeway right of ways were originally rail right of ways, so putting high speed commuter rail in the medians makes sense (much as has been/is happening in the Bay Area with BART extensions over the past 30 years). And of course, the ultimate goal is to reduce VMT by eliminating the need (as well as the desire) to drive so much, through densification, walkable/bikeable mixed-use zoning and public transit.
