Hacker News Reader

Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

Can’t you pay to be in the HOV lane?

Seems like a pretty ideal system. Having that extra lane wouldn’t solve any issues for most drivers. For high occupancy or those willing to pay, it does.

View on HN

In most situations the restricted lane (regardless of how you pick who gets to use it), does in fact benefit everyone else.

Under high congestion traffic throughput plummets. Restricted access to one or more lanes lets you keep them flowing at near the peak, increasing the overall throughput of the system by much more than one of the congested lanes.

The issue is that average number is of little consolation to everyone in the slower lanes.

Most of the Bay Area HOV lanes are not limited access. They let you enter/exit wherever, creating congestion. They also slow down traffic at the points where people have to cross lots of lanes to enter/exit.

When before/after studies have been done, the HOV lanes around here generally make everything worse.

> Can’t you pay to be in the HOV lane?

On a few of them, but not the ones I commute on and am talking about. If you do use one of the 'pay' lanes, it becomes free if you switch your fasttrak device to '3+' setting, and given the frequency of visually obvious violations in the ones you can't pay for, I would be surprised if many people are actually paying for the ones you can pay for.

Depends on the location. Some are strictly passenger capacity.

Really, the vast majority of them are, the fasttrack ones are in a few specific spots, but almost all bay area freeways have at least a 3+ only HOV lane.

I think you missed this point:

> I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced.

How do you know that those people aren't paying?

OTOH, I don't know how you could effectively enforce that single occupant vehicles are paying.

The FasTrak scanners above the lane flash the occupancy setting (1, 2, or 3+) on the driver's transponder. It's easy to observe cheating single-occupant vehicles because the flashed number is 3 (a toll-free rate).

For automated enforcement, there's prior art in red light camera systems that mail tickets/violations to the registered vehicle owner.

Yeah, but you pay the full fare with 1 person, half with 2 people, and it's free with 3+.

It's something that isn't straight obvious though. When I got there I also thought that people were just in violation of the people requirement.

I don't get the point of the occupancy reader if there's no hard-requirement of 3+ in the current zone. Maybe there are some stricter HOV-only lanes nowadays? I left the bay area in late 2023

They did start enforcing a bunch of lanes after COVID.

In Washington state, for one, I know that there used to be a phone number posted periodically for civilian reports of HOV violators. That's gone now with just a warning of the fine amounts.

Yeah and some blind (gender-TBD) Karen reported me on that when they couldn't see my kids sitting in the back seat.

When I worked for a tollway (not SF so maybe they're different), toll violations were enforced by mailing a ticket to the offender after the fact. There weren't any patrols out on the road looking for violators. Don't pay the fine (plus the toll), don't get to renew your license plates. We had agreements with some other states for enforcement against their vehicles in our state. The cameras rarely were unable to get a good enough view of the license plate for the CSRs to not be able to find out whose vehicle it was.

I didn’t miss the point. You had zero way to know if someone is in violation or simply paying to be there.

In the vast majority of Bay Area HOV lanes you cannot pay to be there, that only applies to fasttrack lanes, and in those you can read the occupancy setting of others cars on an overhead screen as they drive though. In both cases you can easily tell, especially in very slow moving traffic who is in violation or not.

Once when bored in very slow nearly stopped traffic during rush hour on a stretch of the 80 with no fasttrack, and in a vehicle high enough to see if there were kids in the nearby cars, I counted a large sample (about 50) cars and found that roughly two thirds of the HOV occupants were in violation.

So basically just another systemic benefit to the more well off

This is how money works. You're expressing anger at the concept of personal property. Yes, those who have more money can afford more expensive goods -- that's the whole point!

It’s not an expensive good - its a commons. The HOV lanes are “rich people super freeways” they are there to help mass transit.

It's a scarce good, which loses most of its value if overused.

The standard Econ solution is to set a price that maximizes throughput. At least some toll roads are attempting to hit that price.

In the US, toll roads are required by law to maintain a certain minimum speed. The price is set based on that.

What law?

I suppose "regulation" would be more accurate, and it only applies to HOV lanes that receive funding from a specific source:

https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freewaymgmt/hovguidance/chapter4.ht...

This covers pretty much all of the lanes that people complain about so I'll stand by what I said.

That's interesting, but also a significantly narrower category than all toll roads.

Sure, but if the complaint is "this was a public road and now you're adding a toll lane" then this is what applies.

On this note, the "rich people super freeways" model actually does exist and works quite well, when implemented as a totally separate tolled highway that runs parallel to the toll-free one. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407

This is allocating public property, not personal.

The money raised by auctioning access is of some public benefit, but is it enough to offset the deep unfairness of the public granting, for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?

Since the roads are paid for by taxes, the software engineers are paying more for them in the first place. Why shouldn't they get more of the benefit?

Because a civilized society is not about "who pays more gets the more benefit" from public infrastructure.

A dog-eats-dog jungle of underdeveloped monkeys in clothing, on the other hand, sure.

If it's a question of fairness, the guy you're replying to has a point. If it's a question of civilization... well, toll roads are kind of inextricable from civilized society.

This is allocating wear and tear on scarce highways. Dividing it evenly by use. Poor people who would never drive on this road should not be subsidizing the use by software engineers, for example (the non-toll model).

> for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?

Housing prices already have this kind of effect -- highly compensated employees can afford to live closer to their preferred locations. There's no reason not to allocate road resources to the users who are willing to pay for them (which is a much broader segment of the population than just software engineers). Pricing is a better system than road communism.

Don't forget that having lanes which are guaranteed to be congestion-free is useful to everyone, not just the rich.

If you're in SF and you get a call that your mother is in the hospital in SJ and it's 5pm, you would happily pay $100 in tolls to get there (I think the actual price is less than $20).

Unfortunately, there is no practical way to do this other than by charging money to use the fast lane, and this means that the rich will get more of the scarce resources than the poor.

This is no big deal - it's kind of a tautology, if you really think about it.

>This is how money works. You're expressing anger at the concept of personal property.

The "this is how money works" argument doesn't work well for chattel slavery and it doesn't work well for this either...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com