When you are in business it is particularly important to try innovations for enhancing your success. Some of those innovations work but some do not. Some that work do so for a time and then stop working. As a business operator it is important to recognize when to terminate your project and move on. However, the government doesn’t often know when to move on from a promising idea. Diamond lanes have outlived their benefit and should be retired.
The first diamond lane (actually known as “high-occupancy lane” or “HOV”) was introduced in 1976. It was on the Santa Monica (I-10) freeway in California. The lane was dedicated to buses and cars with three or more passengers.
There are now HOV lanes in 20 states covering thousands of miles of highways. They operate under different rules depending on the state. One of the annoying rules in California is you can only merge into the lane at specific points that often don’t make sense. That causes many people to merge in and out against the rules, breaking a law that is never enforced.
Why is it time to ditch them? The simple answer is they don’t work.
It is rare when you see the traffic pattern significantly different with a diamond lane compared to the normal flow of traffic in the other lanes. Yes, there are times when you are clogged up in traffic in the left-hand lane while cars are passing you in the diamond lane. You feel a little bit of envy. You wish you had a mannequin next to you with a baseball cap on so you can veer left and speed ahead. Those times are rare.
There are times when you are in the HOV lane, and it is moving better than the other lanes only to have it clog up and now the other lanes are moving much better. You exit the HOV lane and move over. You notice that the reason the HOV lane is clogged is because people who should be driving in lane four (the right lane for slow drivers) are clogging up things by barely driving the speed limit while everybody else is zipping by. The diamond lane provides no flexibility.
That is the problem. It has been fifty years, and these lanes have not gotten close to what they were designed to do. The people who want to design our lives have tried to get us to be in our cars with one or more other people.
Most of the time we don’t arrange our lives to have multiple people in the car. You go to work where you are with people who live nowhere near you. You then go to a business meeting, and you are the only one needed at the meeting. Or you are meeting a friend for lunch, and they are coming from a different direction. Then you go to a family dinner and the four of you come from four distinct locations. That is the way life often works, and the state planners have not been able to change that. People get into cars together when it is convenient and/or it makes sense for their daily activities.
In the minds of those planners, people who drive in a car by themselves are doing two things. First, they are clogging the highways. Second, they are destroying the environment with their single-occupancy vehicles. I am sure that is why they maintain these lanes today because they have all become climate change evangelists.
A recent proposal for the 605 freeway actually had a plan to take out the HOV lane and replace it with the bucolic named ExpressLane. That is a fee lane. There was a proposal instead to add an HOV lane. The entire project was scraped.
If the HOV program were working and people were heeding the guidance of the government wonks pushing this program, it seems to me that they would have been forced to add a second diamond lane after all this time. I have only seen two diamond lanes in limited applications where there are freeway transitions. Virtually no one has changed their behavior because of this program in the past 50 years because it was ill-conceived in the first place. Maybe they were fans of Field of Dreams. You know, “If you build it, they will come.” It worked out much better for Kevin Costner.
The people overseeing this program have already admitted defeat for the purpose of getting people to double up in their cars. They have authorized EVs to use the HOV lane. I am sure they would authorize self-driving vehicles also. At least a dozen states now allow EVs in the diamond lanes. That is a terrible reason to pay extra for a vehicle that has a shorter lifespan.
The question for California is what are they going to do with the diamond lanes when all these new EVs are mandated with 35% of sales in just two years, increasing to 68% by 2030? Whether you believe that will happen or not, they certainly are going to need to add a lane or junk the program.
The program was another well-meaning attempt by our enlightened overseers that never came to fruition. Much like all those bicycle lanes. If they were really enlightened, they would put the program in the trash heap and admit defeat.
