Whodathunk that banning hybrid vehicles from California's High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes would lead to additional congestion on the state's highways and even longer commute times? Transportation engineers at the University of California, Berkeley did, and that's why the University's researchers are now pushing for HOV access to be granted to more vehicles, not less.Wow, ya think? Who's running CDOT these days, Gurney the Green Dinosaur, who never got past 2nd-grade math? Here you've got this perfectly good freeway with X lanes. But we don't want everyone to use the whole thing, so we restrict people from using the leftmost Y lanes. Now instead of distributing traffic load across all lanes, it can only freely distribute across the rightmost X-Y lanes. OF COURSE traffic will become more congested in those lanes: you've got more traffic on them. And OF COURSE traffic will get worse for all lanes, because the privileged users won't drive exclusively in the restricted lanes, at least not if they want to enter or exit the freeway. This causes lane changes, which slows down everyone.
It's a perfect example of why price controls don't work.
(H/T Instapundit)
