Toting Up Pluses and Minuses, Ins and Outs of Car-Pool Lanes

Your disparaging editorial comment (“All in the Car Pool,” Sept. 14) on the proposal to open the car-pool lanes off peak hours to all drivers shows a surprising lack of understanding of how these things do and do not work.

The proposal is not a “sop” to anybody, but a realistic recognition of the fact that there are losses as well as gains in a car-pool lane. The gain, of course, is cars removed from the road by new car pools formed on account of the lane incentive. The loss is the under-utilization that has to occur in order to preserve the free-flow incentive.

Our data on the Costa Mesa Freeway show that this loss is larger than the gain resulting in a net loss of person capacity and increased congestion and pollution for all hours. But the net loss is commonly greatest and most obvious during the off-peak hours when the car-pool lane is significantly under-utilized, and yet the mixed-flow lanes are still badly congested. Opening the car-pool lanes to all would result in the largest reductions of congestion, lost time, pollution and accidents.

In a recent survey by the Department of Transportation, the overwhelming majority of car-pool lane management agencies (17 out of 22 nationally, including San Francisco) already understand this and open the car-pool lanes to all traffic in the off-peak hours.

Drivers for Highway Safety supports the proposal because it will result in a demonstrable reduction in overall, 24-hour congestion, lost time, fuel usage, pollution and accidents. We would hope that reasonable persons would agree that those should be the bottom-line objectives.

CHRIS EMA

Drivers for Highway Safety