Friday, November 12, 2010

HOV Lanes

HOV lanes.

I shall explain HOV lanes simply, yet succinctly enough so you understand why they exist.

1. Crusaderism - Bunch of environmentalists who really don't care about the environment need to feel good about themselves AND are so egomaniacal they have no problems forcing millions of people every day to waste gas and money and time sitting in traffic. All so "they" could claim they "helped the environment" when in reality they just want to do something that gives their lives some kind of meaning. Crusaderism people, look it up on You Tube.

2. Destroying the US economy - There are people, and i firmly believe this, whose sole purpose in their lives is to destroy the US economy. They could be agents left over from the cold war days or people here in the US who just hate America and want to destroy it. There is no better way to destroy an economy by choking off the main arteries by which your labor goes to work to produce things of value.

What continues to astound me is the lemming-like mentality of people who don't rise up and vote out HOV lanes because they swallow whole the "it's good for the environment" scam.

In the meantime they can suffer the longer commutes, the less free time with their families, and OH, more CO2 emissions because 2 million cars sitting in traffic for 2 hours emits more greenhouse gases than 2 million cars sitting in traffic for 20 minutes.

10 comments:

Sparky said...

Yet one more example of "ass-backwards competition". That is, instead of creating an objectively better alternative, they have created an alternative that is only "better" because it has made the original worse.

My city used to have bus-bays on the busiest of the streets. Buses would pull into them and load/unload without impeding traffic while they were doing it. Now they are getting rid of them, forcing the buses to make their stops on the road and *#$@ the traffic flow. Official city reps actually said one of the reasons for doing this was to get more people to ride the bus (by making driving worse). It's going to be even worse once the snows hit.

Anonymous said...

HOV lanes are simply a means by which crusaders and their sycophant thugs in government use their power to choose "winners" and "losers" among individuals.

It is a gargantuan waste of resources, doesn't improve the environment and artificially chokes off productivity.

It is just amazing how government can't begin to understand the total cost of such stupidity.

Why is the taxpayer paying for two-thirds of the cost of a light rail ride in the Twin Cities?

Why is the taxpayer subsidizing half the cost of a bus ride in Mlps/St. Paul.

Why are taxpayers paying $80 a one-way ride on the NorthStar commuter rail?

At least with the last one someone got smart enough to drop the extension to St. Cloud.

Kelly said...

All true, but you're overthinking this. There are a limited number of things Greens can do to make public transportation suck less, so they devote their considerable ingenuity to making private transportation suck more. Increased congestion and waste aren't bugs, they're the point. Crusader feel-goodism is only a nice bonus.

And they're only trying to destroy the economy so it can be replaced by one that works so much better in their imaginations.

Dalrock said...

On I 30 in Dallas they have temporary HOV lanes that pull real estate from the outbound side in the morning and the inbound side in the afternoon. The rest of the time and during weekends there is no HOV lane. If you are going to do an HOV lane, that probably makes the most sense.

I can't find the link to it but I recall reading several years ago about the main Houston paper editorial board getting caught pushing against the convenient service roads with built in u turn lanes that we have in Dallas. They felt that anything which made road travel more efficient would stop people from magically deciding to spend quality time with criminals, bums, and the insane on public transit.

The problem is, ordinary people really haven't thought the whole transit thing through. When I first moved to Dallas, normal, conservative people I asked for advice would always tell me I should take the train if going downtown to watch a sporting event, etc. This sounded promising, so I asked them what their own experience was like riding the train. None of them had ever actually used the train, but they were quite sure it was the only way I should travel downtown. Thanks guys...

Ryan Fuller said...

The idea is that by giving incentives to carpool, they take some cars off the road.

The problem is that having a carpool-only lane isn't enough of an incentive, especially when there's a moron driving in it at five under the speed limit.

Give HOV lanes +10 mph over the regular speed limit with a fine for going slow, and we might see some actual use out of them.

Anonymous said...

I live in southern Ontario; our local bus system costs $12M/year, they recover about $1.5M/year in revenue. Your job is to guess where the remainder of the shortfall comes from.

Hot Sam said...

I don't think many people carpool just so they can travel in an HOV lane. Most people who carpool would have done so anyway.

Carpooling sucks. You're always at the mercy of the other person's time schedule, punctuality, and personality.

Advocates of these schemes rarely, if ever, do any cost benefit analysis to see if it will work or, after the fact, to see if it's working.

Blackwing1 said...

The problem here in the Twin Shitties is that the fed-dot-gov basically black-mailed them into accepting the HOV lanes. Without putting in those lanes, the feds were NOT going to put in the funding to re-build the 1950's freeway system.

Probably the single worst example is the I-394/Hwy 12 corridor, with the "reversible" lanes. Built at a truly enormous expense, those HOV-only lanes down the middle of the freeway are only capable of being used for limited times during the day...and the cost of all of the traffic controls, bridges, ramps and everything else was huge.

They could quite literally have built the freeway four lanes wide in EACH direction for less than it cost to put in that assinine HOV system.

Just remember the words of the guy who used to run the Metro Council, Ted Mondale, who I heard (in a public meeting) say, "Our goal is to let the freeway system get so bad that public transportation will look good in comparison." Bear in mind that this person headed up the government agency responsible for long-term transit planning! Talk about putting the fox in charge of the hen-house.

The collectivist goals of reducing individual liberty reaches one of its pinnacles in the transportation field...after all, how can you control somebody if they're free to drive where ever they want?

JB1000 said...

The key to efficient HOV lanes is to use public tax dollars to build the road then make it a toll road.

Once the elite forces 95% of the dirty peasants off the roads, well, their own drives will be so much more enjoyable and quick.

Just like with air travel. Imagine how nice it would be if you just got rid of the 95% of the "public" that doesn't deserve the privledge of air travel.

Ed Kohler said...

I thought the point of transportation initiatives was to move people or goods. As I read the comments here, it sounds like it's more about moving cars. Strange logic.

While there are many people who really do need their car throughout the day, there are plenty of people who would probably live more productive lives if they spent 30 minutes on a bus each way rather than negotiating bumper to bumper traffic for an hour.

I'm not sure how you'd expect more lanes to be built. Wouldn't you normally oppose eminent domain? Should all of the businesses along both sides of 394 be wipes out so we can build more lanes in both directions in order to handle peak traffic times with less slowdowns?

Let's say that we needed to figure out how to get 50,000 more people a day into downtown Minneapolis from the Western suburbs for 9-5 jobs. Are you honestly suggesting that we should pay the land acquisition cots, building expenses, bridge expansion rebuilding costs, and ongoing maintenance costs rather than figure out ways to get people into down in an efficient matter for less money?