https://ccag.ca.gov/us-101-express-lanes-project/
There's an effect called induced demand where adding more free lanes to a road actually increases congestion, not decrease. Traffic engineers in the bay area have studied this and found it would be the effect if they just opened the HOV lanes up to all traffic.
A toll expressway allows for relieving congestion on normal lanes without increasing road demand, and will pay for itself over time.
In areas that are basically entirely car-dependent, the implication is that more roads encourage more journeys, and that fewer roads result in more journeys not taken. It's unclear why persuading people not to travel is inherently a good thing. Presumably they're going somewhere to see people and do things.
Perhaps building new roads doesn't help them do that any faster, but there are more people getting to do the things that they want.
The problem with adding lanes to roads is not that people want you to work out instead of sitting in your car. Nobody really cares. The problems is that it doesn't scale, there isn't space to add enough lanes to get everyone into a car. Additional lanes come at the cost of making the road less suitable for walking and biking, further pushing people into their cars unnecessarily. Hence road diets; use expensive urban land for something other than holding slow-moving cars for 3 hours a day.
Car-centric suburbs were an interesting experiment that didn't work out. Unfortunately, half of America owns equity in the failed experiment, so it's going to be a rough couple decades while we adjust to something more sustainable. (Self-driving electric cars aren't going to save them.)
Whether or not you like cars, they're simply not sustainable. It's great that you have one and take advantage of the government subsidies, but it's not a thing that future generations are going to do.
And your other response above implies that road maintenance is bankrupting suburban cities, but it's entirely possible that those cities are simply not properly prioritizing/managing their spending, which is a common problem in California politics.
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/Financial-S...
Among most cities that declare, physical infrastructure is usually the least of their problems, it almost always is rooted in public employee pension guarantees that can't be met.
"Unfunded retirement liabilities are the main contributing factor to the $333.5 billion in city-level debt"
The two cities in the worst shape? NYC and Chicago, which are far more urban (and well-serviced by public transportation) than cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas or Anaheim which barely have any downtown urban core and are essentially just large glorified suburbs.
Propaganda about road engineering written by road engineers. Can you request these "studies"? Any data to share, post-project?
Induced demand is real, that's true. But the degree to which it changes things is highly suspect. Restricting a lane increases congestion in the other lanes. It encourages the far-left lane to make more extreme lane changes (people tend to stay in the fast lane as long as possible, then need to quickly cross 4 lanes to exit). And because it slows normal people down, it increases traffic on non-highways, which has a large number of negative issues: more severe accidents (head-ons and 90-degree impacts are quite rare on divided highways), more idling (more traffic at red lights, which then leads to more drivers having to wait 2 cycles), more pedestrian accidents and more traffic near schools, etc.
Artificial bottlenecks are not an improvement, if the true goal is to increase overall traffic throughput. If the goal is simply to raise revenue for the government, wink wink, then it works great.
Monetize further = reduce needed taxes.
> - just opening the lane would decrease congestion for everyone
This is true iff they don't incentivize carpooling.
As for your speed difference issue, at least in Southern California, the carpool lane has a double yellow separating it from the regular lanes, hopefully giving some added safety since cars shouldn't move back and forth except at designated entry and exit sections.
A lot of people think the purpose is to reduce pollution from the cars removed from the road (i.e. only one car's pollution instead of three), but in reality it should reduce pollution even MORE than that (because fewer cars on the road means everyone can drive faster, reducing the time spent with your car polluting while stuck in traffic).
However, they messed this up by adding these other ways to drive in the carpool lane. Sure, an electric vehicle pollutes less, but letting them drive in the carpool lane eliminates the benefit of fewer cars on the road; three electric vehicles still take up the same amount of space on the road and cause the same traffic as three gas guzzlers.
Then they added paying a toll, which does nothing to reduce pollution at all, and is simply a way to generate revenue. This is completely counter to the original purpose.
So if they stuck to the original idea, I think it is worthwhile. In the original form, converting the carpool lane to a regular lane would not actually reduce the congestion for everyone, because while you are adding a lane, you are also increasing the number of cars on the road (of course there are a lot of factors that go into this... how many cars would carpool anyway, and how many cars are using the carpool lane at any one time).
Here in Southern California, however, the carpool lanes are almost pointless. During high traffic times, they are just as congested as the regular lanes. In fact, they are often times slower than the regular lanes when congestion is medium... since they are only one lane and you can't switch lanes during most sections, you can end up with one slower car holding back everyone.
Where in Seattle is that true? I used to take the bus all the time before I got a car, but now it's hard to justify since the bus is usually 1.5-2x longer than by car...
For example from my apartment to Pike Place Market, Google Maps currently estimates 20 minutes by car and 37 minutes (if you don't miss any transfers!) by bus.
Adding lanes adds demand, and you get just as much (usually more!) congestion as before.
The demand is constant and does not change. You can only shuffle it around. You have a few choices:
1. Add lanes. This gives people the option to move to the suburbs with a long commute.
2. Build housing in urban areas. This gives people the option to live close to work without a commute.
3. Add public transportation connects the suburbs to the cities.
4. Massive homeless problem. This is because people cannot commute from the suburbs and cannot pay rent in the cities.
The government has the power to add lanes at the expense of smaller, more dangerous shoulders and medians. But the ability to add lanes only extends as far as the shoulders. For the most part, California has run out of shoulder in urban areas.
The government does not have the power to build housing because of NIMBYs.
Buses don't solve the problem of commuting between the suburbs and the cities. If you have to sit in traffic anyway, people will sit in traffic in their car. The government doesn't have the power to build light rail because that means tearing town existing structures, and again -- NIMBYs.
So massive homeless problem it is.
Demand fluctuates relative to amenities, jobs, goods, services available on either end of a thoroughfare. If people like the offerings in one metro area vs another, or in a suburb vs a larger city, more people travel to and from that place. If they have things they want to do in their own backyard, they do not do that. The distribution of all of those things changes over time because of course it does.
Thus the law of conservation of traffic flux is violated and none of your conclusions are sound.
Sure sounds like public transit design is a red herring, no? :o)
the better a drive is, the more people will do it. "the commute is actually okay" is the reason people buy houses in the suburbs. the people buying houses in the suburbs are the reason the commute becomes terrible. if the drive sucks, people will find a way to avoid it, whether that's finding recreational opportunities close to home, taking transit, buying a house in the city, or finding a job close to home (or working remote)
Speaking only for myself, I didn't buy a house in the suburbs because "the commute was ok", I bought a house in the suburbs because it was the only place I was able to purchase a place to live.
My rent on my 1-bedroom apartment near the city was $500 a month more than the mortgage+property taxes in the suburbs. The mortgage is constant, the house is appreciating value, some of the mortgage goes towards the principal and I "keep" that. The rent was going up 5-10% per year.
The commute was not ok. But I couldn't afford not to. $500 a month is $500 a month.
In the decade or so since, my house appreciated significantly in value, and I was able to purchase a house 5 minutes from work. But I could not have done that without sacrificing much of my sanity for a not-ok commute for nearly a decade.
The reality is that housing and traffic are deeply, deeply entwined.
No, the reason they do it is to buy a house with three bedrooms and a yard for $225k instead of, say, paying $4000/mo for a shoebox they can never meaningfully aspire to own. The Commute is only a candidate reason they wouldn't make the move.
(And if large cities had sane housing policies and lots of supply, this all might be less of a problem, but, well, that's not our world.)
- they are very unsafe. pretty much danger is proportional to the speed difference between stopped traffic and the carpool lane.
- people pay extremely high taxes to use the roads in the first place, why monetize further?
- just opening the lane would decrease congestion for everyone
- all that new infrastructure to track and charge people costs money, how much overhead is there?