I was commuting between SF & Sunnyvale a year ago for a couple of months. For the whole time I tried to find a service connecting people for carpooling. Found several but none of them had a meaningful number of active users.
It was mind boggling to sit, day after day, in stalled traffic on the 101 with two empty carpool lanes on my left and four lanes filled with lone drivers all the way between San Jose and San Francisco.
These days, even the carpool lanes are full, given that electric cars and even hybrids before a certain year have unlimited legal access even without any passengers.
At any rate, I see people abusing it all the time, countless people driving illegally in the car pool lane even though nobody else is in their car -- I see at least one person everyday doing this.
More lanes means a temporary decrease in congestion, which incentivizes people to choose automobiles as their primary form of transportation, which fills up the roads again. Repeat this cycle endlessly as roads are widened.
Basically widening roads doesn't decrease traffic in the long term. This is why LA and Houston and other car dominated places have wider roads than anywhere else and terrible traffic.
The core issue is that automobile oriented infrastructure infrastructure isn't very efficient at moving people in the first place. If you're going to spend a lot of money to increase transportation capacity, extra car lanes is a poor choice.
in theory yes but i don't see any proof that traffic would increase as much as the increased capacity. reminds me of bogus economic arguments. in your universe we could make a 10,000 lane highway and there would still be congestion.
Ooh boy, I doubt that will work out well for them. Captive audience, but I can't think of a place where people are less likely to be receptive to marketing than the DMV.
It was mind boggling to sit, day after day, in stalled traffic on the 101 with two empty carpool lanes on my left and four lanes filled with lone drivers all the way between San Jose and San Francisco.