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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of when Cal Trans kicked the Priuses out of the carpool lane on I-880, and a UC study showed that it decreased the speed in all lanes, especially the carpool lane.

The outcome? Instead of widening the roads or eliminating the carpool lanes, they kicked even more cars out, converted additional lanes to carpool / express lanes, and further snarled traffic.

There's a state-wide mandate to reduce commute miles, and most cities have interpreted it to mean "increase congestion", not "improve public transit".

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If you make driving more frustrating and less convenient, it can make the other options relatively better in comparison and people may take them. It can also generate demand/political will for other transit modes that may not exist if driving everywhere just works fine for most people.

I'm not saying that's their plan, but on the scale of like 2-3 decades it's not preposterous that making driving worse now helps eventually. Certainly it's not worse than widening roads, something that at this point is well understood to not actually help.

They have been at it for two decades already. It mostly just propped up house prices near jobs.

(And, no, they are not allowing houses to be built at anywhere near the rate needed to meet demand.)

Floridian here, what do you mean they kicked Priuses out of the carpool lane?

In my experience, High Occupancy Vehicle lanes restrict usage based on the highness of the occupancy of the vehicle... What does brand have to do with this?

To boost adoption, hybrids and EVs were allowed into the HOV lanes (without high-occupancy passengers).

Some places incentivize low emissions vehicles by giving them access to high occupancy lanes.

My guess is that previously a Prius (or similar hybrid) qualified for the HOV lane regardless of how many passengers. The intuition is that because they are so fuel efficient, it's similar to carpooling.

California let Priuses in to the carpool lanes for awhile with a "Carpool OK" sticker I think due to their reduced emissions. BEVs later got the same stickers but they were either limited in number and/or eventually were phased out.

For me, I'd always just risk the fine for the 6-7 years I was down in the Bay Area. It never happened and I got hours or possibly whole days of my life back.

Former new yorker here, but ev-hybrids were (maybe still are?) allowed in carpool lanes even if they were only carrying the driver. When I lived there priuses were by far the biggest population of hybrids or evs

Not a Californian, but I believe there used to be a deal where in some places a more efficient vehicle would be allowed in the carpool lane regardless of the number of occupants.

Virginia was similar... when hybrids first arrived, they were allowed special tags to use HOV lanes without the occupants. As they became common-place, that exemption was removed.

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