A random thought on carpooling

[raindom]

Hi all. Your favorite resident traffic complainer here. Watching traffic each morning and the 99% of single occupants driving on the bridge, and witnessing the same going down I-5 yesterday – I thought about something.

The idea of the HOV lane is to encourage and reward those considerate enough to carpool. Pretty simple. But when you imagine a 4 lane highway and only 1 HOV lane – how does that make sense? What about making a single lane for single occupants? Wouldn’t that make for some serious encouragement to fix this mess? Not to mention the pollution. Food for thought.

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[skeeter]

I dunno about this proposal. In your example currently 1% of cars get 25% of the lanes and the remaining 99% get 75% of the lanes. You’re proposing that 1% of cars get 75% of the lanes and the remaining 99% get 25% of the lanes? I don’t think that will decrease pollution. I think it will exponentially increase pollution.

Carpooling is great. I either carpool or bike over 90% of the time. But for the vast majority of drivers it simply doesn’t work because it requires that you accommodate another person’s schedule on a semi-regular basis. And most are unable or unwilling to do that.

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[raindom]

How do you figure it would increase pollution? It would mean less cars on the road. Unless you’re referring to the single occupants being on the road longer. It certainly wouldn’t be convenient. But neither is taking the bus in my opinion, and many people do it so that they aren’t contributing to traffic and are reducing emissions. I’m not suggesting it as a horrible punishment. I’m suggesting it as a tactic to overhaul a serious issue in Seattle and the surrounding area. Many can argue it simply wouldn’t be possible, but if it were implemented – you would suddenly see that it is. Smokers are addicts and claim it’s impossible to stop. Raise the price 10 fold and magically they will.

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[metrognome]

raindom – the way to raise the price for SOVs is to prohibit free/cheap employee parking except for (registered) carpools. This is a basic traffic demand mgmt. technique that meets a lot of resistance for obvious reasons. Washington and Seattle have been particularly successful combining HOV lanes (despite heavy resistance from Tim Eyman and others) with other incentives for large employers by codifying these requirements in the Growth Management Act.

However, when so many people are willing to pay $20 a day for parking (and so many downtown bldgs. rely on that revenue,) it’s difficult to come up with incentives for smaller employers.

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[skeeter]

It would increase pollution because I think it would only change the behavior of about 1 or 2 percent of the population yet it would cause SOVs to be on the road much, much longer.

People don’t carpool to save money. Yes, there is some money savings, but that’s not the reason they carpool. They carpool because it is the socially responsible thing to do.

Just my 2 cents. I can see your heart is in the right place raindom. I do not have a solution other than taxing the heck out of cars, parking, and gasoline. But that’s going to penalize the poor.

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[raindom]

Thanks for chiming in both. I hope we’re all on the same page that I’m simply brainstorming – a far hypothetical reach at that. :)

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