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Are electric vehicles allowed in the High Occupancy Vehicle lane without being high occupancy (single occupant)?

Yes, a fact which will make any bus rider want to reach for his bazooka. Man, there is nothing more irritating than being stuck in the HOV lane in a bus in a traffic jam consisting entirely of teslas and leafs.

They should not call it the "HOV lane" since they allow non high occupancy vehicles (e.g. hybrid car, electric car, motorcycles). My understanding was the HOV lane's purpose is to encourage car pooling (i.e. high occupancy). Allowing single occupant motorcycles and electric cars sort of defeats this purpose.

As always, the trick is to remember the purpose of the HOV lane: keep traffic moving. That's part of the reason motorcycles are allowed. It's considered safer to let a motorcycle stay in motion than be in stop and go traffic [1]. And having been stuck in the Dallas MixMaster since the I-35E N HOV was shut down, I can say holding a motorcycle half clutched for half an hour is dang near painful. This is also the reason motorcycles are allowed to ride the line in traffic jams (also air-cooled engines need to stay in motion in summer).

Plus, if you don't have a passenger seat, the bike's at full occupancy, which ought to be at least near high occupancy!

[1] http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freewaymgmt/faq.htm#faq15

Edit: managed to get the highway wrong. Whoops.

You seem to be assuming that HOV lanes are the result of some rational regulatory process. In fact, they have been shown in every study to disrupt traffic with little effect on carpooling.

The naming is historical baggage. In practice, "HOV lanes" today serve two (intended) purposes: (1) reduce gridlock; (2) reduce pollution. As originally conceived, (2) could only be achieved by actual high occupancy vehicles being used to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. Now it can also be achieved by low- or zero-emission vehicles, hence the exception.

I prefer the name "High Subsidy Lane" for them.

Boom. Comment of the month. ^^^

They are: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1086720_california-exten...

(As a side note, kind of defeats the purpose of the HOV lane to me, but maybe the "if it sells more electric cars..." excuse offsets it enough.)

HOV lanes are nominally intended to encourage more ecological use of transit resources, with congestion relief as a coincident effect (fewer cars on the road -> less pollution, lower energy usage, reduced rate of needing new transit infrastructure).

Since electric cars serve many / most of the same purposes, it makes sense to append them to a reward system which has already proven effective at driving adoption and retention of preferred behaviors.

If it's spare HOV capacity, then I agree. But if adding the electric cars to HOV lanes increases the congestion in HOV lanes, it might degrade their effectiveness in incentivizing the behaviors they currently incentivize. For example, the attractiveness of either carpooling or riding the bus declines if HOV lanes get slower. Carpooling in particular needs enough of a delta in the regular v. HOV trip times to make up for having to pick up the other carpool members (unless you live in the same place).

One solution is to allow a capped number in, to incentivize purchase but only up to a threshold that doesn't overly degrade HOV trip times. I believe that's what California did for hybrids, allowing HOV usage for the first N purchased.

NorCal still has a couple things that they can do to alleviate congestion in carpool lanes. They can extend the hours to the carpool lane, or even make it HoV for 24 hours a day (SoCal does this).

My guess is that in a couple years we will see 24 hour carpool lanes in NorCal.

Yes, with the right sticker:

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/vr/decal.htm

Yes. California previously allowed hybrid cars in single-occupant HOV lanes, too.

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