To be fair, this is already true of driving in general. Often in commuter traffic you’ll see one guy driving extremely unsafely, darting in and out of lanes passing everyone as fast as they can. You know this person does this every day for years, saving time by putting everyone else in danger.

Lucky to see one guy in commuter traffic. I need to drive few times per month during commuter hours and in Seattle area there are few types of such unsafe driving:

1. Trucks - not keeping the lanes, speeding (it's 70mph cars and 60mph trucks, trucks bypass me when I'm driving 70).

2. Old company vans and pickups - that's surprising to me, but I frequently see some old Gutter/Plumbing/Heating van darting in an out of lanes. I'd think they'd get fined or in accident sooner or later, but still.

3. Large pickups. They usually are speeding, going in and out of HOV lane closer to Seattle. Never saw HOV enforced on I90.

The enforcement was somehow increased this year, but only until heavy traffic (you can see it daily 5am-6:30am), but never during heavy traffic, which would be more helpful.

Statistically speaking, those drivers have less chance to pass on their genes to the next generation. So in the long run, it’ll work out just fine.

So does the family of four driving the speed limit that gets killed in a head-on collision.

Watch the opening scene of the movie Idiocracy

Saving a tiny amount of time

Yes, I think Myth Busters did an episode on this. It saves surprisingly little time.

The thrill of weaving through traffic vs the tedium of being the traffic might be the real incentive, whether the driver is consciously aware of that or not.

Its a facto, but I think people also do think it makes more a difference than it does.

One thing I have noticed from using satnav is that even with a mostly motorway journey the difference between driving fast and driving at a more leisurely pace is never more than a minute or two per hour compared to the predicted time.

I knew it from seeing how often I later caught up with someone driving very aggressively, but quantifying it made me realise just how consistent the small difference is.

I'm not sure this is true. In Atlanta, on a very busy two-lane city-street commute into work, I follow traffic laws scrupulously, and have excellent driving skills, but I take every advantage I can that's not illegal or antisocial -- e.g., I always pass people going slower than me, preemptively change lanes to avoid buses and cars I can tell are slow or turning, take small shortcuts that add many more turns to the trip -- which means lots of lane changes, etc. My wife, on the exact same route and time, does not do any of this; she just follows the car in front of her until she arrives. My driving shaves a solid 10+ minutes off of her 40-minute commute this way. That's significant (>25%), and adds up to 20 minutes more time at home with my kids, etc.

And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.

I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.

> The thrill

I think it's more of the self-deception that they're more important than others and that they're meaningfully getting ahead of others. This is a major issue in American culture where it's not just about doing great, but about doing "better" than others (competitive in areas it's pointless to be competitive about)

Is it surprising though?

I just drive normal and stick to the right unless I'm passing and try to maintain a good speed the whole time - no breaking and reaccelerating. I often see the people weaving and then pass them 5 minutes later because they tried to pass on the right and got stuck behind a semi. Ha.

Idiots that try to pass on the right should get their driver's license revoked immediately.

It’s legal to pass on the right here in MN. States should enforce left lane for passing only, but they don’t. This creates a situation where the left lane has effectively become the right lane and thus you can use the right to pass instead.

E: it is not legal to pass on the right in MN, unless you’re on a multi-lane road; which is basically all major arteries and thus makes this law unenforceable for all intents and purposes.

It generally isn’t even possible or useful to pass on the right if people follow the traffic laws of keeping right unless passing. It becomes necessary only when people are illegally hanging out in the left lanes going slower than the normal flow of traffic.

If you're getting passed on the right, you're doing it wrong.

I don't know why you assume this is about me? Participating in traffic is better if it's predictable, people passing on the right break that assumption.

Not really, it can save serious time if done properly and carefully in a consistent way on a long distance drive. Driving the length of California on I5, you can easily get stuck behind side-by-side slow traffic and spend the entire drive averaging about 60-65mph. Or you can aggressively cut through this isolated 'island' of slowness, and average 80-85mph. Over the ~400 miles from SF area to SoCal, this saves about 1.5 hours each way.

I used to have to do this round trip commute, and could consistently save ~3 hours per week of time by driving more aggressively, and I never got a ticket driving like this doing the commute weekly for years.

I do however try to be as courteous and safe as possible, and would time my lane changes to maintain safe following distances and not actually cut people off. If people would stay right except while passing like they're supposed to, this wouldn't be needed.

Correct.

Whoever downvoted your comment has either never driven this stretch of the 5 or they are the reason it is so bad.

It’s the idiots in cars who insist on doing exactly 65 in the left lane next to a semi that cause the problem. Get past just one idiot holding back hundreds of cars and you will find miles of completely open road.

Its all of those rolling hills where you are going up and down over and over. People don't pay attention and let their car slow down up hills, then let their cars roll up to 90 going back down the other side. Do it over and over and you get the whole centepede effect, except cars far enough back have to practically stop.

You can think of it as basic math. If the speed limit is 60 and you go 70, across a 10 mile drive you save at most 2 minutes... and only if everything is perfect. I stopped driving so fast once I realized that leaving a touch early was the dominant factor.

The solution is surprisingly simple. You just need moderate enforcement of fines that are scaled to the offenders income and that escalate exponentially with reoffense in a reasonable time period.

Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.

That should only be the case if the fine was actually prosecuted in court.

Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc. In other words, many people just pay a injustice fine to avoid more trouble. This would punish those type of people even more.

>Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc.

The system is in fact architected to maximize this in some states. Virginia and Ohio come to mind.

You're being downvoted by people for whom this would be incredibly inconvenient.

Haha this is a classic Bay Area solution. It’s why you have a low-income discount if you speed 120 mph over the speed limit and get caught by the camera. It is well known that if you get hit by a poor person speeding at 145 mph it hurts less.

So you somehow think that the $300 fine deters or hurts the person making $200k a year the same that it does the person making $20k per year?

It's not that the poor person speeding is any less dangerous than the rich person speeding, it's that the $300 fine doesn't really matter to the rich person. It's just a price they're willing to pay on random occasions to go faster.

We already have points as a wealth-invariant mechanism to affect drivers. No one has demonstrated that a flat percentage of income has a flat response curve. Given you already have a wealth-invariant mechanism, the fact that you are trying to add something else makes me think it’s not about wealth invariance.

More than that, you need to enforce the existing laws. Raising the fines but continuing zero enforcement will do nothing.

Pretty sure high fines would greatly incentivize increased enforcement.

Why? The police officer gets paid the same either way. And that's probably in line with how we want it, lest police officers start seeing infractions that don't exist when their daughter's next birthday comes near.

The officer, sure. But departmental policy?

That can help, but policy doesn't execute itself, it's executed through the police officers. Most cities aren't prepared to be able to follow-through to the logical conclusion the steps they'd need to take if their police force is fully intransigent with regard to following policy, so the policy itself is set based in part on what the force itself is willing to enforce.

I'm confused - why wouldn't the department want to execute a policy that benefits them greatly through increased revenue? If it's not profitable or desirable to do so, increase the fines.

> The solution is surprisingly simple

Has this been tested and shown to be successful or is your confidence based on feels?

Look up the concept of "day fines", which are used in Finland elsewhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

Surprisingly they were experimented with in the UK, for a very brief period of time. But not taken into use.

Every now and again a particularly large fine, often for speeding, will make the news. For example this story does the rounds now and again "Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket":

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

That doesn't answer the question, do they work better than flat fines and points on licenses (that lead to suspensions)?

How do you decide if something like that works? Is it by stats on "repeat offenders", or something else?

All I can say is that when you've been asked to pay €50,000 for speeding I suspect you'll be hesitant to speed again, and so I believe the system works.

So the answer to the original question is that your confidence was based on feels.

> Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.

Great. Fine me $1 million, and I will fight the case with lawyers, thus slowing down the public legal system for thousands of other legal cases, whether traffic related or otherwise.

IDK why this is downvoted. In practice everything is this way. Anything over a few grand is basically an invitation to lawyer up and fight. Whether it's a traffic fine or some local zoning BS this is always how it goes.

And by "IDK" I mean "I have some suspicions but they're not flattering to the community".

High definition cameras are cheap, I don’t see why these “fights” would be costly.

>I don’t see why these “fights” would be costly.

Most of society doesn't share most of HN's pro-jackboot disposition so there'd be warnings, appeals, etc, etc.

As a comparison point, it took a 20yr frog boiling exercise to turn DUI into a huge state revenue stream and that's at least backed by a crime most people can agree is fairly serious. To get the same for less serious crime you'd need to invest even more up front in propaganda because people aren't dropping dead from road infractions today like they were 40+yr ago so your ability to appeal to emotion is even more limited.

We can't even release the Epstein files. We don't go full jackboot on petty crimes with a victim. To think that there's public apetite to ruinously fine motorists out of large sums of money over petty victimless infractions is Luxury Space Communism (TM) type tone deaf lunacy.

And this is all assuming you get a bunch of friendly judges because this stuff is pushing it in terms of what the 6/7/8/14th amendments will tolerate.

Like FFS, get out of your filter bubble people.

That sort of stuff makes for great fantasy for people who fancy themselves central planners but back in the real world it flied in the face of the principals of a) punishment fitting the crime b) justice being blind-ish, which "real society" values far more than internet comment sections would have you believe.

I disagree. Not charging a rich person enough to incentivize them to change means that the punishment doesn't fit the crime for them. Similarly, charging people a fine proportionate to their wealth is much more just than a fine that is devistating for the poor but insignificant for the rich.

I’m generally not a lefty type person, but aren’t resource agnostic fines actually less blind-justice than the alternative?

The wealthy speeder shrugs it off, while the poor speeder has to change their spending allocation in a way that is noticeable and could be challenging.

Why should the punishment have a different impact based on wealth? The felt impact of a monetary fine fundamentally depends on how much money the offender has. Whereas the classic “locked in a cage” punishment affects everyone equally.

The fines are already plenty high, it's just that they are essentially not enforced at all. You could definitely illegally commute everyday in a carpool lane, and expect to maybe get a $409 ticket between 0 and 1 times every 5 years or so.

A $490 ticket every 5 years works out to only $1.88 per week- effectively free for anyone that makes enough money to commute in a car in the first place.

They increase the fine for repeat tickets.

This is one of those things that suffers greatly from selection bias and language games. The people unbothered by minor impolite stuff don't come on the internet and complain. The people who think everyone going 5-over is a crisis do.

If you define dangerous as "how dare that BMW not use a blinker" type moves, yeah that stuff is everywhere.

If you define dangerous as "Y likely to cause an accident given X exposure" then it must be tautologically rare because if people were behaving seriously dangerously get bit by it in fairly short order. I can't remember the last time I saw a "wow, that was really pushing it and in poor taste" move. Weeks perhaps.

I really wish we would have special enforcement for just this (and transit), and just adjust the fines and staffing levels until enforcement breaks even on costs, and evasion is minimal.

And make the fines based on income.

Perverse incentives are a bitch. I can see this becoming speeding as a service.

If they snap the license plate and no fast pass they send a bill in the mail for the full monthly cost of a pass if I recall correctly

Is there any enforcement such as towing and impounding vehicles that don't pay those bills?

You cannot update the registration on your car if you have outstanding fines (at least in CA, but probably in most states).

Driving a car without a registration will (in theory) get you pulled over, and eventually your car will be impounded.

In practice? Car ownership is required to participate in society in most parts of the US and governments are very unwilling to take away people's ability to drive.

>In practice? Car ownership is required to participate in society in most parts of the US and governments are very unwilling to take away people's ability to drive.

Because there isn't support for the iron fisted rules enforcement a lot of HN favors and if the .gov just did it anyway the people would elect politicians who promise to reign that in. Keeping the power on the books and rarely using it is what benefits .gov the most so it's what they do.

the issue is that the HOV lanes are currently full of people who have fast pass but just set it to say they have 3 in the car.

i truly see enough people doing this when i commute that at $500/ticket i could cover my entire state income tax in 1-2 days. seems obviously economical to enforce this.

Can’t you pay to be in the HOV lane?

Seems like a pretty ideal system. Having that extra lane wouldn’t solve any issues for most drivers. For high occupancy or those willing to pay, it does.

In most situations the restricted lane (regardless of how you pick who gets to use it), does in fact benefit everyone else.

Under high congestion traffic throughput plummets. Restricted access to one or more lanes lets you keep them flowing at near the peak, increasing the overall throughput of the system by much more than one of the congested lanes.

The issue is that average number is of little consolation to everyone in the slower lanes.

Most of the Bay Area HOV lanes are not limited access. They let you enter/exit wherever, creating congestion. They also slow down traffic at the points where people have to cross lots of lanes to enter/exit.

When before/after studies have been done, the HOV lanes around here generally make everything worse.

share

I think you missed this point:

> I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced.

How do you know that those people aren't paying?

OTOH, I don't know how you could effectively enforce that single occupant vehicles are paying.

The FasTrak scanners above the lane flash the occupancy setting (1, 2, or 3+) on the driver's transponder. It's easy to observe cheating single-occupant vehicles because the flashed number is 3 (a toll-free rate).

For automated enforcement, there's prior art in red light camera systems that mail tickets/violations to the registered vehicle owner.

Yeah, but you pay the full fare with 1 person, half with 2 people, and it's free with 3+.

It's something that isn't straight obvious though. When I got there I also thought that people were just in violation of the people requirement.

I don't get the point of the occupancy reader if there's no hard-requirement of 3+ in the current zone. Maybe there are some stricter HOV-only lanes nowadays? I left the bay area in late 2023

They did start enforcing a bunch of lanes after COVID.

In Washington state, for one, I know that there used to be a phone number posted periodically for civilian reports of HOV violators. That's gone now with just a warning of the fine amounts.

Yeah and some blind (gender-TBD) Karen reported me on that when they couldn't see my kids sitting in the back seat.

When I worked for a tollway (not SF so maybe they're different), toll violations were enforced by mailing a ticket to the offender after the fact. There weren't any patrols out on the road looking for violators. Don't pay the fine (plus the toll), don't get to renew your license plates. We had agreements with some other states for enforcement against their vehicles in our state. The cameras rarely were unable to get a good enough view of the license plate for the CSRs to not be able to find out whose vehicle it was.

I didn’t miss the point. You had zero way to know if someone is in violation or simply paying to be there.

In the vast majority of Bay Area HOV lanes you cannot pay to be there, that only applies to fasttrack lanes, and in those you can read the occupancy setting of others cars on an overhead screen as they drive though. In both cases you can easily tell, especially in very slow moving traffic who is in violation or not.

Once when bored in very slow nearly stopped traffic during rush hour on a stretch of the 80 with no fasttrack, and in a vehicle high enough to see if there were kids in the nearby cars, I counted a large sample (about 50) cars and found that roughly two thirds of the HOV occupants were in violation.

So basically just another systemic benefit to the more well off

This is how money works. You're expressing anger at the concept of personal property. Yes, those who have more money can afford more expensive goods -- that's the whole point!

It’s not an expensive good - its a commons. The HOV lanes are “rich people super freeways” they are there to help mass transit.

It's a scarce good, which loses most of its value if overused.

The standard Econ solution is to set a price that maximizes throughput. At least some toll roads are attempting to hit that price.

In the US, toll roads are required by law to maintain a certain minimum speed. The price is set based on that.

What law?

I suppose "regulation" would be more accurate, and it only applies to HOV lanes that receive funding from a specific source:

https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freewaymgmt/hovguidance/chapter4.ht...

This covers pretty much all of the lanes that people complain about so I'll stand by what I said.

That's interesting, but also a significantly narrower category than all toll roads.

Sure, but if the complaint is "this was a public road and now you're adding a toll lane" then this is what applies.

On this note, the "rich people super freeways" model actually does exist and works quite well, when implemented as a totally separate tolled highway that runs parallel to the toll-free one. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407

This is allocating public property, not personal.

The money raised by auctioning access is of some public benefit, but is it enough to offset the deep unfairness of the public granting, for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?

This is allocating wear and tear on scarce highways. Dividing it evenly by use. Poor people who would never drive on this road should not be subsidizing the use by software engineers, for example (the non-toll model).

> for example, software engineers a shorter commute on average than teachers?

Housing prices already have this kind of effect -- highly compensated employees can afford to live closer to their preferred locations. There's no reason not to allocate road resources to the users who are willing to pay for them (which is a much broader segment of the population than just software engineers). Pricing is a better system than road communism.

Since the roads are paid for by taxes, the software engineers are paying more for them in the first place. Why shouldn't they get more of the benefit?

Because a civilized society is not about "who pays more gets the more benefit" from public infrastructure.

A dog-eats-dog jungle of underdeveloped monkeys in clothing, on the other hand, sure.

If it's a question of fairness, the guy you're replying to has a point. If it's a question of civilization... well, toll roads are kind of inextricable from civilized society.

Don't forget that having lanes which are guaranteed to be congestion-free is useful to everyone, not just the rich.

If you're in SF and you get a call that your mother is in the hospital in SJ and it's 5pm, you would happily pay $100 in tolls to get there (I think the actual price is less than $20).

Unfortunately, there is no practical way to do this other than by charging money to use the fast lane, and this means that the rich will get more of the scarce resources than the poor.

This is no big deal - it's kind of a tautology, if you really think about it.

>This is how money works. You're expressing anger at the concept of personal property.

The "this is how money works" argument doesn't work well for chattel slavery and it doesn't work well for this either...

Depends on the location. Some are strictly passenger capacity.

Really, the vast majority of them are, the fasttrack ones are in a few specific spots, but almost all bay area freeways have at least a 3+ only HOV lane.

> Can’t you pay to be in the HOV lane?

On a few of them, but not the ones I commute on and am talking about. If you do use one of the 'pay' lanes, it becomes free if you switch your fasttrak device to '3+' setting, and given the frequency of visually obvious violations in the ones you can't pay for, I would be surprised if many people are actually paying for the ones you can pay for.

You can't see that they're in violation: the RF transponder effects compliance and you pay when using the lane, if you're talking about the lanes i used to use to great effect, for money.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FasTrak )

The FasTrak system shows the occupancy setting, it’s obvious when people are displaying the wrong setting.

So obvious that I was incorrectly reported by a "fellow" driver when they apparently failed to see my kids riding in the back seat.

Tall driver in a SUV looking down on an open topped convertible isn’t a false positive. But sure, cops occasionally pull people over in HOV lanes for false positives and then let them go.

However, when you’re looking at 100’s of cars doing the same thing false positives only account for a small percentage of that.

Not really sure, but this comment doesn't seem responsive to what I posted (since I was not in an open-topped convertible).

And the point about cops is exactly the issue - there is an actual human who observes and notes that it was a false positive, vs an anonymous report with no counterpoint entered into whatever database is tracking these reports.

Does that setting actually matter? When I lived in the area that had these, I always forgot to set it when the number of passengers in my car changed. I never saw any difference. The charge is the same.

Depends on the area. The 210 in Los Angeles allows you to jump on the toll-lanes for free if you have >= 3 people in the car.

And I think at certain times it's only >= 2 people.

It makes a difference in some locations such as I-580 5am-8pm: https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/help/using-your-fastrak-fl...

i think i must have had a previous generation FasTrak because my rf transponder didn't have an occupancy setting on it. perhaps i had set it up on the web portal. this was over 10 years ago, from east bay to/from cupertino.

^ There's a deep lesson in this comment.

Indeed. Benevolent introverts too often get the short stick for sticking to rules.

I think the benelovent introvert being discussed seems to have overlooked

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FasTrak

What does introversion have to do with this?

> It is a system that punishes people willing to follow the rules.

Every system?

It would be better if we had congestion pricing for all lanes. Then it would be less of an issue.

The HOV lanes cause absurd amounts of congestion, both from encouraging all the HOV drivers to aggressively switch lanes, and because they greatly increase the speed differential between lanes.

They’re a money / surveillance grab.

Is there data to support this or is this just your hunch? Because I’m betting this is false.

It’s not a money grab as much as moving more of the actual cost of freeways onto drivers who are mostly used to externalizing it

people drive slow in HOV lanes. and the. in the lane next to it, people do too. it destroys the natural speed hierarchy of highway driving.

no one respects that hierarchy anymore anyway in my experience. The HOV lane is usually traveling faster that the passing lane.

I really would like to see a citation for how adding new, congestion-free lanes with limited opportunities for merging to an already congested highway makes it worse.

yeah i think you’re just making up reasons to be mad about something you were going to dislike.

Traffic is one of the most boring fucking things to talk about.

If you want to feel pissed about something: One of the most popular new cars purchased in California was the Jeep Wrangler 4xe, because it gave you HOV access and a $7,500 tax credit, even though nobody charges it and its battery is anemic anyway.

EVs no longer have HOV access.

You're gatekeeping being mad about a system that is asking me to decide between breaking a law/social contract, and wasting hours of my life every week while watching other people break it the whole time?

No, I'm not mad about the Wrangler 4xe, it's really great that plug in hybrid tech is moving into a wider range of vehicles useful for things like rough terrain. A small battery is still plenty for the vast majority of driving people actually do.

If you drive in the FasTrak lanes without an account you pay the fee + $10 surcharge (for a first time violation), and it goes up on the second violation:

https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/help/invoices-and-penaltie...

I'm having a hard time finding a citation but according to Google's AI summary if the second violation is unpaid they put a hold on your DMV registration, and the fine itself can be sent to a collection agency.

I agree empirically I see people driving through the lane without a tag (i.e., no number shows up in the overhead display), but maybe these are people with FasTrak accounts being lazy?

Or people who drive over the cones right before the RFID reader

Or lie and set the transponder to 3 people

Or don't have license plates so can't be identified

> but according to Google's AI summary

Rarely a good citation. No pun intended.

Some people just set it to 3+...

One annoying thing is I've tried to pay, but can't.

I spend about four to five months per year in the Bay Area, but have Canadian license plates. The website doesn't even let you enter a Canadian plate, or a foreign plate.

So I bought one of the transponders at Walgreens, and just leave it in the glove box because it has 20 bucks or something when you buy it.

But I can't check its status, don't know how much is left on it, have no idea what I'm paying, really sucks.

Go to https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/home/index.shtml, make an account and link your tag using it's serial number. Hopefully you'll get the information you're looking for there.

As I said, making an account requires a license plate. Even for "Create a Fasttrak account". It's on the second page, demanding a license plate.

We just need better HOV enforcement. Preferably with space lasers.

That's the actual problem with CA in general if you haven't noticed. Be good and watch them take everything.

This is an easy fix. Ditch the HOV element and make the lane toll-only. Tolls already encourage carpooling -- more people in the car means less toll per occupant.

strong agree. i like the HOV lanes in concept, but the reality of California means they should just be toll lanes.

people also drive slow as shit in HOV lanes

>I live in the Bay Area and hate HOV lanes. I can look over and see that more than half of the drivers are in violation, and yet it is effectively unenforced. It is a system that punishes people willing to follow the rules.

There's a lesson about society and government in there.

That's not a good reason to hate HOV lanes. That's a good reason to hate the enforcement policy. In Boston there is a trooper at the entrance that will jump in front of violators and pull them over.