ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Everybody Into the Car Pool, Please

It’s no easy task motivating people to share a ride to work. Maybe envy will do it. Admitted or not, that’s one of the things at work in the establishment of a car-pool lane, the latest of which has just opened along a 10-mile stretch of the San Diego Freeway from the Santa Ana Freeway to the Corona del Mar Freeway. As anyone who drives it knows, it’s one of the most trying commutes around, and there’s no practical alternative route.

In years past, the opening of a car-pool lane has been met with high drama in Orange County from drivers who object to restrictions limiting the lanes to vehicles with two or more passengers. But when the newest northbound stretch opened last week, little was said. A legal challenge by a group organized to fight car-pool lanes as unsafe and ineffective failed when a Superior Court judge, while agreeing that the state Department of Transportation could have done better at its preliminary studies, rejected the challenge.

The latest stretch now links up with 14 miles of car-pool lanes on the San Diego Freeway to form the longest stretch of such lanes in California. The lanes have proven extremely successful in some areas, including along the San Bernardino Freeway, the major route into Los Angeles from Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and along the congested Costa Mesa Freeway in Orange County.

High-occupancy vehicle lanes are designed primarily for those who are lucky enough to be able to arrange to share a ride to work. There are many commuters who can’t do that, either because of their location or because of unusual work demands or hours. They may never get the thrill of whizzing by rush-hour traffic--unless they want to risk a citation that can cost them upwards of $246.

But there are plenty of commuters who could share rides if they thought about it a little harder, and they are the ones Caltrans is correct to entice into car pools. Being stuck in traffic while drivers on these special lanes are making an honest name out of “rush hour” might be just the place to think about that.