I am unpopular with friends who inhale loudly, shocked, when I say I think carpool lanes are crap. How are they helping the environment??? THEY AREN’T.

Trust me, if I COULD CARPOOL, I WOULD! But I can’t. And, note to you self-righteous mothers – carting your kid around ain’t carpooling! By those standards, carpooling with my wallet or my purse would be just as well – they’re both things I have to take with me!

I am so aggravated that I have to pay taxes for upkeep on a lane that I can’t even USE! It’s not fair, right and it echoes the liberal mind of “people should do the right thing.” – well, they should but they won’t and now you’ve cause a bigger problem. Well done….dips*its.

but… I will try the blow up doll trick.

Denver recently opened up the HOV lanes for single payer Tolls. I don’t have data on how much extra has been made however but I think it was a good compromise and hopefully will add some well needed highway funds.

Personally I think the ‘idiocy’ in this article is the author. It makes me happy to see that you got ticketed.

I also don’t see how this is ‘saving advice’. I don’t know how much you got paid to write this article but I would ask for the money back.

I’ve never talked to someone who carpooled because they wanted to use the carpool lane. Using it is just opportunistic, when you happen to have more than one person in the car.

I think a *much* better solution is a fare lane. For $10 per trip, you get to drive in the fast lane. If the fast lane gets congested, then charge $15.

According to the author of this piece, the idea of HOV lanes is “idiotic”, “Treehuggers” are apparently misguided and out of touch with reality, and carpooling is “unamerican”. Since this classification means that I am misguided and unamerican, I resent it strongly.

Was there no way to present these ideas without name-calling and knee-jerk hostility? How about researching the effectiveness of HOV lanes (which is certainly questionable) and presenting some alternative ideas?

It’s simple: carpool, bus, or take a motorcycle to ride in the carpool lane. The fewer cars on the road, the more gas or oil and money are saved, and the faster the commute gets.

Maybe my perspective comes from living in a city that has the third worst rush-hour traffic in the nation.

And I don’t get the “it’s unAmerican” bit either: how many US movies have you seen where characters meet sharing a cab in New York City? Did Thomas Alva Edison have all those patents and inventions because he was too American to bother with forward-thinking ideas?

I ride a motorcycle in the carpool lane.The $750 I pay to ride in it goes to feed and insure my scoot for a year.

I was also a passenger in a car whose occupancy was carpool-legal when we were hit by a Chevy Trailblazer commandeered by a woman who thought her big dogs counted as occupants too. She claimed the dogs weren’t obeying her commands to sit down as she illegally tried to get into the carpool lane.

I do agree, though, that they really don’t accomplish anything as far as saving energy or reducing global warming is concerned.