Turning a Critical Eye on the Carpool Lane

I commute to work, and when I say commute, I don’t mean drive: I mean commute, as in I live over 60 miles from the campus at which I teach. In terms of driving time, it takes me nearly 90 minutes to get from my home to school, and that’s if there are no unforeseen events.

The first thirty minutes of my commute is on a winding mountain road, and any other driver who’s ahead of me has the potential to be one of those unforeseen events by merely traveling slower than I do.

Then there are the traffic accidents: the freeway is filled with unskilled multitaskers, and none of them has the common decency to have single-car collisions: they always have to involve others in their shortcomings.

Which brings me to the carpool lane.

When our schedules allow, I carpool with a coworker, but it’s not an easy thing to do. We rarely have identical schedules, so there’s an hour or two either before or after arrival during which one of us is trying to work in a shared office that’s the size of a small home’s master bathroom. (To say it isn’t an ideal working environment is an understatement.)

There are other issues as well: once committed to a carpool, errands are out of the question, and for me, this makes things very difficult. Although my coworker lives 45 miles from campus, she is 10-15 minutes from things like the grocery store, the gas station, and the typical assortment of convenience-based businesses to which most of us who live in non-yurts have become accustomed.

My shopping and gassing up and getting a hair cut are best planned around a trip into town (i.e. going to work) because I live thirty minutes from civilization. Unfortunately, once I drop off my carpool partner, I have passed everything I need, and turning back down the hill sounds like fingers—lots and lots of fingers—scraping down a chalkboard.

I also have friends and family who live near my campus, so getting to see them before or after I teach is a luxury I lose when I am sharing a ride with someone else.

But the gas savings is huge, and passing hundreds of bumper-to-bumper cars is such a time saver, I generally compromise by choosing one day per week as my non-carpooling day and plan all of my errands and visits around it.

I have mixed feelings about the carpool lane: I think it’s a great idea to encourage drivers to share rides whenever possible; however, I’m not sure the carpool lane is the best way to encourage what ought to be natural behavior.

The carpool lane functions on three basic principles:

1. Take away and entire lane of the freeway from the majority of drivers causing what is already a major traffic backup to become worse.
2. Allow an itty bitty percentage of drivers to use an almost-empty lane provided they pack their cars with the requisite number of bodies.
3. Pretend taking away a lane from the majority to encourage a minority does something to help the environment while overlooking the fact that the backed-up cars are getting nowhere fast and throwing crap into the air for greater amounts of time.

Again, the point of the carpool lane is to get people who are going to the same place to share rides, and by ridesharing, to get a car off of the roadway.

So how does a minivan with one adult and one or more kids fit? Was there ever a chance that mom or dad or insert-adult-title-here was going to go someplace while the child was going to go to another place, but they decided to take only one car to save on gas and to toss less pollution into the air?

I’m sorry, but the carpool lane should be reserved for driving-aged persons who take the time to plan, and who are willing to sacrifice a bit in the name of line-cutting and environmental responsibility.

The non-driving-age passengers should not count because no car was taken off the road by the actions of the adult and child being in a car together. Unless I get to pack up one of my dogs and use the carpool lane—that would make things fair.