Car-Pool Lanes: the Pros and Cons
After reading all the discussion of the car-pool lanes on the 55 Freeway, I think a major point has been missed. The lanes are not just unsafe and a nuisance but discriminatory.
Such lanes are the creation of office-bound bureaucratic moralists who can’t conceive that anybody has any reason to drive a car or truck unless it is to go back and forth from work.
It has probably never occurred to these folk that not everybody on the road is a commuter working in a rabbit-warren office with thousands of potential riders. And it never will, because they aren’t the kind who can be let out without a keeper!
A substantial part of the vehicles on the road each day are occupied by only one person because that is a job requirement.
Delivery people, outside salespeople, those on their way to the airport, somebody going to pick something up, mothers running errands--these are the people who cause the afternoon crush to be so much worse than the morning rush.
These people cannot get riders and cannot use the car-pool lanes. Sooner or later one of them, or their bosses, tired of wasting time and money sitting on the freeway, are going to get mad and file a proper lawsuit, and the car-pool lanes will be a memory.
OWEN MALOY
Irvine
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