Thursday Apr 28, 2005

Are Carpools designed by sadists? I think so. Carpools are just plain evil!

I live in the SF bay area. Today I was driving from Palo Alto to Milpitas and after I got on to Highway 237, I began crawling in the middle lane with traffic barely moving for almost 8 miles. And then on my left, I see this wide open car pool lane, with just an occassional car or two whizzing by. What the ding?!! 25-30% of the lanes are reserved during peak time for who now? This makes no sense. I see countless cars in my lane and the lane to my right all barely moving and the lane on the left is empty! So I think carpools are evil and a waste of thousands of hours, because:

  • Carpools take anywhere between 30%-25% of the available lanes.
  • Number of cars using carpool lanes is a miniscule fraction of total cars in all lanes at the time.
  • This means a majority of the people who are stuck in regular lanes are stuck to provide incentive to this miniscule population.
  • The majority of the cars are stalling and guzzling gas to let a few handful vehicles have the luxury of breezing through for 4 peak hours of traffic.
  • A majority of us cannot carpool. It is impractical to arrange a carpool unless you live and work with your carpool partner!
  • I don't think the Carpool lanes are encouraging carpooling. I haven't seen any increase in the number of cars using the carpool lanes.
  • Most carpoolers are not really carpoolers by design, but by accident.
  • Carpools are un-American and anti-democratic. ;-)

Bottomline, Carpools are an unjustifiable failure that waste lots of gas and lots of productive worker hours.

There is only one way to like carpool lanes. If you are driving in it. Or if the car is in the pool!

YouRIt

Is Apple being silly or what ? I had not heard of this upcoming book, and even if I did I probably would not have paid much attention to it. Until I saw this and this today. Apple pulled Wiley books off their shelf despite the author and publisher saying that there is nothing negative about Steve Jobs or Apple in this book. I think this silly move by Apple is going to make this book a best-seller. This book is now on my list to buy now. There is probably more to this story. I am intrigued. What gives?

YouRIt

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