HOV Hypocrisy
Posted April 17, 2008 byCategories: Personal
Today was a very rare occasion. I was actually awake before 8AM and on the road, taking my mom to the airport so she can visit family for a couple weeks. After seeing her off and heading back to my place, I was greeted by by rush hour traffic as soon as I left the airport. A drive that normally takes me 25 minutes turned into an hour long exercise in frustration and boredom. I got so bored I actually started doing math on how silly the concept of HOV lanes are.
So, let’s take a mile of highway, 3 lanes wide (+1 HOV), and say there is a vehicle every 100ft. Kind of like I-635 in Dallas. This is fairly conservative considering that people just about touch bumpers as they’re grinding along at 5mph, but it makes the math easy. So on our ideal highway we have 528 cars per lane-mile, or 1584 cars across 3 lanes. Sitting there. Or barely moving. For an HOUR. As I am sitting there, I watch cars zip by in the HOV lane .. one about every 30 seconds, so maybe 200 cars passed me during the 20 mile drive home. Oh, and half of the cars only had one person who obviously got fed up with traffic and realized there was a completely empty lane not being used. See where I’m going with this?
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