3 ms·

Pool lanes are not about the "compression factor" they create right where they are. Between "natural" multipassenger vehicle occupation and the occasional under

by usrusr 11y ago

Pool lanes are not about the "compression factor" they create right where they are. Between "natural" multipassenger vehicle occupation and the occasional underutilization they would indeed be very unlikely to ever cause a local net improvement. But if they occasionally do motivate actual pooling, that "compression" will carry on to roads without a pool lane because the passengers won't pop out their magical inflatable cars from the trunk once the pool lane ends. Therefore, actual usefulness not only depends on the amount of lane-generated pooling and the level of local underutilization (which needs to be non-null to provide a pooling incentive), but also on the fraction of regular road vs pool-laned road distance traveled under "lane motivated" multipassenger occupation. The net result might still be negative, but a purely local observation on pool lanes cannot be enough to come to a meaningful conclusion.

rebootthesystem 11y ago
Sounds wonderful, yet the truth is that carpool lanes are a farce. Nobody carpools in Los Angeles. Or very few for that matter. The lanes remove a significant percentage of road capacity. They are also abused by single drivers, trucks, empty buses, etc. It's a complete joke. The net result is to reduce road capacity and aid in creating congestion due to the constriction they create. I see it every day across hundreds of miles of roadway cris-crossing Los Angeles. I am willing to concede that there might be a magical place in the US where people wake up every morning and say "what a beautiful day, I think I will carpool with my neighbor because we both work for the same company". Not in Los Angeles. That's just not the nature of this city. This isn't a "factory town" where there are three destinations for the bulk of the population and carpooling makes sense. If I go down my block the distribution of destinations is probably as random as you can get. And these destinations are random in vector form. In other words, direction and distance. Carpooling is actually impossible. And then there's the question of infrastructure and schedules. Also, people are too spread out. There's on person I know I could consider carpooling with. Here's the issue: I would have to drive 15 miles out of my way every day to go pick him up. He would have to drive 30 miles out of his way to pick me up. Meet in the middle? No can do. There is no infrastructure to support that. You'd have to leave a car at some random parking lot illegally in order to do this. And this isn't a solution that scales. Oh yes, our schedules are very different, which means that 95% of the time we couldn't carpool even if we wanted to. People have kids, family, responsibilities. Who wants to get a call from school to go pick up their kid who just threw up, be 50 miles away and not be able to respond because they carpooled with four other people. The whole thing is one big joke perpetrated on us by stupid politicians. Who know what the payoff may have been. It's certainly not helping anyone at all, just like the high speed train they want to build (what a joke).

by usrusr 11y ago

rebootthesystem 11y ago

Sounds wonderful, yet the truth is that carpool lanes are a farce. Nobody carpools in Los Angeles. Or very few for that matter. The lanes remove a significant percentage of road capacity. They are also abused by single drivers, trucks, empty buses, etc. It's a complete joke. The net result is to reduce road capacity and aid in creating congestion due to the constriction they create. I see it every day across hundreds of miles of roadway cris-crossing Los Angeles. I am willing to concede that there might be a magical place in the US where people wake up every morning and say "what a beautiful day, I think I will carpool with my neighbor because we both work for the same company". Not in Los Angeles. That's just not the nature of this city. This isn't a "factory town" where there are three destinations for the bulk of the population and carpooling makes sense. If I go down my block the distribution of destinations is probably as random as you can get. And these destinations are random in vector form. In other words, direction and distance. Carpooling is actually impossible. And then there's the question of infrastructure and schedules. Also, people are too spread out. There's on person I know I could consider carpooling with. Here's the issue: I would have to drive 15 miles out of my way every day to go pick him up. He would have to drive 30 miles out of his way to pick me up. Meet in the middle? No can do. There is no infrastructure to support that. You'd have to leave a car at some random parking lot illegally in order to do this. And this isn't a solution that scales. Oh yes, our schedules are very different, which means that 95% of the time we couldn't carpool even if we wanted to. People have kids, family, responsibilities. Who wants to get a call from school to go pick up their kid who just threw up, be 50 miles away and not be able to respond because they carpooled with four other people. The whole thing is one big joke perpetrated on us by stupid politicians. Who know what the payoff may have been. It's certainly not helping anyone at all, just like the high speed train they want to build (what a joke).