The Liberal Order

Boone, North Carolina

The New York Times has a nice piece on Boone, North Carolina, home of Appalachian State University.
Here's a blog on happenings in the Economics Department at ASU run by John Whitehead.
Oh, how I miss the beauty of those mountains.

Jet Blue Pilots Prove Me Wrong

I guess I've been proven wrong.

Car Pool Lane Congestion

You know those times when you are sitting in traffic and notice that the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) or carpool lanes adjacent to you are basically empty, with a car whizzing by unimpeded every few seconds, or ten? The efficacy of carpool lanes lies in restricting access. If the incentive is to reward commuters for reducing the number of cars on the road, thus easing congestion, then permitting access to solo drivers to reward them for seemingly environmental reasons eliminates the rewards to carpoolers.

A detailed study of carpool lanes on Interstate 95 found that the number of hybrids more than tripled between last spring and October. State transportation officials fear that the trend will continue as more hybrids enter the market and more commuters take advantage of an exemption allowing them to ride alone in such vehicles.

The findings reflect the sentiments of carpool-lane users, who have inundated state officials with complaints about increased delays and congestion over the past six months. Many blame hybrids.

"For every two cars, there's one hybrid," said Cora Seballos, who carpools daily from Springfield to the District. "Since September, usually the regular lanes have less traffic" than the carpool lanes. Seballos said she has to leave home a half-hour earlier because of the increased congestion.

HOT tolls are a better solution anyway, for numerous reasons.

The results are striking. In almost all cases, HOT or Toll lanes provide a greater degree of fiscal, consumer welfare, and environmental benefits than any other expressway investments. Echoing previous research by UC Berkeley's Joy Dahlgren, Kim shows that there is a very limited set of conditions under which HOV lanes can be the best option. But in most cases, society would be better off if the lanes were converted. Converting to GP lanes is most defensible when HOV use is less than 7% of all corridor trips, and there are under 700 vehicles/hour in the HOV lane. But in almost all cases, converting to a Toll lane produces greater benefits, primarily because it can preserve free-flow conditions as traffic continues to grow and freeway congestion worsens. And because Toll lanes generate substantial revenues for the highway system.

So goes one of the few, mostly legislatively derived, benefits of owning a hybrid.

Here is an Op-ed by Reason's Rober Poole warning against just this outcome.

Carpool lanes — formally called high occupancy vehicle, or HOV, lanes — were put in place to ease traffic congestion and to improve the efficiency of our freeways. So the first problem with allowing hybrids into HOV lanes is that these additional vehicles will soon use up the carpool lanes' capacity, making them nearly as congested as the regular lanes.