Posted on 07/08/2005 8:30:36 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
ARLINGTON, Va. – Instead of crawling out of bed at 4 a.m. to beat the morning rush, Frank Murphy sleeps late these days. He says he owes it all to his hybrid car – and a law that has some of his fellow commuters upset. Drivers of the environmentally friendly cars are allowed to cruise solo in Virginia's car pool lanes, slicing Murphy's daily two-hour commute in half. And since buying a hybrid 18 months ago, Murphy is leaving his home as much as three hours later.
"The quality of life has gone up tremendously," he said.
But Murphy's joy is a source of irritation for his co-worker, Kristine Johnson, who does not own a hybrid. To travel in the car pool lane, she lingers at a commuter lot until two strangers agree to ride with her.
The inconvenience pays off less than it used to: Johnson complains that hybrids are making car pool lanes as congested as regular lanes.
"It's not fair," Johnson said. "In the afternoon it's all hybrids around me. I used to be able to go home in 30 minutes. Now it takes 45."
So goes the debate between Virginia's car-poolers and hybrid owners. Lawmakers say the hybrid rule wasn't meant to clog the car pool lanes, but to encourage people to buy the cars, which run on a low-polluting combination of electricity and gasoline.
Normally, the federal government would withdraw highway money from a state that gave hybrids commuter-lane privileges. But Virginia has a special waiver while Congress considers allowing the states to make their own rules for hybrids. Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia and Florida are poised to move ahead with similar incentives if the Senate passes a long-delayed highway bill.
California Assemblywoman Fran Pavley wrote legislation to open her state's car pool lanes to single-occupant hybrids. She said the bill contains "numerous safeguards" to avoid replicating Virginia's woes.
For example, California's Department of Motor Vehicles would limit the number of hybrids in the commuter lanes by issuing only 75,000 special decals. State transportation officials would review the law periodically, and it would only apply to hybrids that get at least 45 miles per gallon.
Brian D. Taylor, director of UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies, argues against linking hybrids with car pool lanes, which he says exist for an unrelated purpose: taking cars off the road.
"It would be sort of like saying you should allow nurses and school teachers to exceed the speed limit because they contribute positive things to society," Taylor said.
Joe Waldman, general manager of northern Virginia's Landmark Honda, said officials should not be so quick to blame crowded car pool lanes on hybrids. He noted that solo drivers in regular vehicles continue to violate the rules, despite stepped-up enforcement and a new state law doubling some fines to as much as $1,000 for a fourth offense.
But Virginia Department of Transportation spokeswoman Joan Morris said, "Even if we got rid of all the violators tomorrow, we'd still have a capacity problem."
In April 2003, about 2,500 hybrid drivers in Virginia registered their cars and asked for "clean fuel" license plates, allowing them to use the car pool lanes, Morris said. By May of this year, the number had more than tripled – to about 9,000.
Meanwhile, Murphy, the Virginia hybrid owner, continues to sleep late, while Virginia transportation officials consider compromises such as letting hybrids use the lanes only at times when traffic is less congested.
Murphy said it would be ridiculous to end the hybrid exemption altogether, but agrees something's got to give.
"I do have to admit, there are a lot of (hybrids) out there," he said.
Here is CA, carpool lanes are used less then 10% of the time "off-hour" and at best, are only used 37% of the time at "peak" times while the goverment forces traffic jams on everyone else.
If I where governor for one day, I would remove and end all car-pool lanes.
The law of Unintended Consequences...
I have seen bikers in the HOV lanes here in DFW during the rush, mostly because splitting lanes in some areas of the metroplex is a death wish. I have used them myself in my B.N. period (Before Nuptials).
I wish I still could, but DW feels that I would be endangering my ability to provide for the family by riding rather than driving.
I need stats on accidents per mile, injuries per mile, and fatalities per mile for bikes and cars, factoring out bike accidents caused by idiot riding (wheelying on the freeway, racing, etc). Any thoughts on where I can find these?
When driving at a constant speed, the electric motor may kick in by mistake sometimes, but if you are truly driving at a constant speed, your hybrid is not improving your mileage. Also, you say that "just the battery" is providing power. I don't think this is possible. I understand that the max depletion rate on the prius battery is only 15 bhp for 10 s. This wouldn't even be enough to over come the rolling resistance that your car experiences at highway speeds.
What's HOV? Sorry, we don't have carpool lanes here so I'm unfamiliar with this term.
HOV = High Occupancy Vehicle
The idea being to encourage car-pooling or to get the most out of a vehicle by making sure it is as full as possible. I think buses are excluded from most HOV systems though (both public transport buses and private carriers).
In CO, they're called H(igh) O(ccupancy) V(ehicle) lanes. Same thing as "diamond lanes".
All of this is funny, but not nearly as funny as folks who ride with mannequins in the car to circumvent the rules. That is quite a solution, if you have convincing dummies.
[Insert DNC/John Kerry/DU joke here.]
18 wheelers pay tons more in taxes and many of them are regulated to only ONE lane of traffic and in many cases not allowed on certain interstates or freeways because of "hazardous loads"...your whining is only a yip compared to the long hualers cries...
Nah, NHTSA and DOT, for all their purported unbiasedness, tend to report stats to disfavor bikes, as in "deaths for over-40 bikers rose over the period of 2001-2004", with no acknowledgement of whether the overall number of bikers over 40 also rose during that period. So, did the percentage of over-40 bikers that were killed out of the whole group go up, or did it stay the same and just the raw numbers go up? In all likelihood, the percentage of over-40 bikers killed dropped relative to the total number of over-40 bikers, but we may never know unless we get access to the raw data, and maybe not even then, depending on how the study was run.
10 years? Try 4-5.
Some pigs are more equal than others.
Good point.
I've always insisted that hybrid technology, after you factor in issues concerning the batteries, does not make sense on small passenger cars. And, as far as I know, it isn't used in the only instances where it would make sense, i.e., city buses and delivery trucks.
How about a lane of oncoming traffic?
I get a steady 45-47 miles per gallon on the highway and thats driving with traffic, around here 65 to 75 miles per hour. If the flow of traffic is around 55 to 65 miles per hour I can get 50-55 miles per gallon easy. Something is improving the mileage. The prius battery does kick on by itself not for very long, but it does. The car can according to Toyota travel 1 to 2 miles at 30 miles per hour on battery alone and I've gone up 7 stories in the parking garage at work using the just the battery though it was drained to the 20% mark.
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