Those transponders are cool though. I have a different one for my electric car with a CAV sticker which lets me use some of the SoCal lanes alone.
This is no different from any toll road except the toll road and the free road are right next to each other and are therefore perfect substitutes with the only difference being the amount of traffic on each.
Where is it different?
They don't ask which brand of car you're driving, but there's a really high correlation between income level and living area - northern parts being the richest.
The privatization of the expressways was pretty much enabled by the viability of the rail networks, which are also mostly privatized, mostly profitable, and extremely well-built.
Unless maybe I failed to make clear that the standard deductible's job is to represent car+gas+etc costs.
They are really competing with trains. Even if they were free.
Plenty of places in the US have whole highways that require payment to use. Same for most tunnels and bridges that you can go around but it takes significantly longer.
That's how they make up the difference. That, and property taxes.
I would have said "it" was paying more to use the fast lane, and hiring a driver is definitely paying more.
So, yes, everyone's sitting around waiting, but it's the difference between sitting at home in your living room and sitting in the DMV.
In the sense that -- suppose that you have a 4 lane highway. Adding a 5th lane will actually not help much to increase the capacity of the highway if it is traffic-bottlenecked. For certain traffic volumes and lane configurations, adding lanes doesn't increase throughput.
So having a toll lane basically just helps to generate revenue from people who are willing to pay (and allow those who are willing to pay to drive slightly faster past traffic), while not significantly slowing down most other people (who already experienced congestion in certain stretches of highway before this).
Now, whether this feels fair and is a good idea is a different question (and clearly generates a lot of opinions).
They wanted to ensure that the HOV lanes move fast enough that the people who are carpooling will actually be rewarded for doing so. This meant that there had to be a dynamic toll for solo drivers.
Imagine the outrage when on a particularly busy day, this dynamic toll exceeded $20 for a ten-mile journey. The reality is plenty of people were cheating and using the HOV lanes as solo drivers, and now the tolling mechanism means they can no longer get away with it.