On Carpools: Penny Wise and Pound Foolish?
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!
Life Carpool Humor
As long as crawling is still more attractive to you than finding a pooling partner you don't deserve better.
I've carpooled from Berkeley to SF using a public pickup - easiest thing in the world.
> Carpools are un-American and anti-democratic.
Yeah, right.
Posted by Matthias on April 29, 2005 at 12:05 AM PDT #
I think it's unfortunate that the US car culture is not picking up on environmentally friendly options like smaller more efficient engines and the use of carpooling. Hopefully rising petrol prices will force this change to come about sooner rather than later.
amd.
Posted by amd on May 13, 2005 at 08:59 AM PDT #
Posted by Hargreaves on September 28, 2005 at 02:44 PM PDT #
Posted by Dan Kearns on January 12, 2006 at 05:12 PM PST #