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Comment by SkiFire13 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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