Study: Car pool lanes dont help

[Looney]

The HOV lanes have a vehicle flow of 1600 per hour, compared with 2000 per hour for a standard lane.

Ok, i'm not great in math... but if the carpool lane has an average of 1600 per hour compared to 2000 for the other lanes, then isn't it working? Because you need a minimum of 2 people per car i believe, that would mean those 1600 cars are transporting at minimum 3200 people. Whereas each standard lane are only transporting 2000.

 

[charrison]

Originally posted by: Queasy
Well, the idea is to get more people into less cars...hence "car pool". I don't think this works in practice though as I more often see the HOV lanes in Atlanta loaded up with cars carrying a mom and one or more kids.

The real answer is dyanmic tolls based on traffic demand. Get the tolls high enough and everyone will carpool, just just the soccer moms totting their kids around.