Any car with more than one person in the vehicle should have VIP access. That's at least twice as efficient use of space and natural resources as one person in a 2-ton SUV driving to work or wherever.

Case to consider: Taxi, Uber, Lyft, etc? Those have 2 people, but only 1 person is really traveling to the destination most of the time.

That might be the intention, but it creates a hurdle to using the lane AND create another racket to police people for. HOV lanes cause traffic with a "QoS" capping roadway bandwidth while creating a channel for multiple drivers.

If you want to incentivize efficient highway use, deny it to all but multiple humans over the age of 0 days (no pun intended).

And then beyond that, rip up highways and replace them with train services.

Taxis (including Uber/Lyft) are worse IMO. In the bay area, many schools do not have school buses, then maybe we should invest more in school buses to reduce cars on the road (HOV lane or not). At big companies which have buses to shuttle employees to the office, many parents cannot use them because they have to stop at a school, etc.

> Kiddie poolers are not removing cars

I car pooled with classmates and their parents as a kid.

count unlicensed riders as half a person. That way a carpool with two kids and one adult is HOV.