Lane Violation

In the editorial (May 14), there was another blurb about the efficacy of car-pool lanes, and as usual, you follow the other do-gooders who think they know best how to make people lead their lives.

If you really want to see what an added lane does to reduce traffic, then open the car-pool lanes to all traffic during rush hour to see some real reduction in traffic.

All pool lanes, no matter what name they go by, infringe on my constitutional rights by using my taxes discriminately. I have been, for the last 40 years, in the construction equipment business. I drive, on an average, 40,000-plus miles per year. I doubt that 1% of the time there is more than one person in my car. I am one of several hundred thousand people in business whose car is the means to a living.

I pay exactly the same amount of gas tax as the car-pool lane automobiles. Because of the large number of miles per year that I drive, I pay far more than the average car using the pool lanes.

Yet my taxes are used in a manner that restricts my use of the gasoline tax that is designed to provide better and more roads and freeways for me to use.

Unless my logic is totally incorrect, that places me, and the previously mentioned hundreds of thousands of salespeople whose automobiles are their means for a livelihood, in the position of being taxed in a discriminatory manner.

JOHN A. CLOES

Huntington Beach