For a while, drivers of California’s ever-growing number of hybrid vehicles had it easy.
As long as they had a yellow sticker on their car, they could drive solo in the high-occupancy vehicle lanes, also known as the carpool lanes.
But in July, the California Department of Motor Vehicles ended this special privilege, sending thousands of hybrid drivers back into the regular freeway lanes.
Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley decided to study the environmental impact of this and they concluded everyone is now worse off.
Researchers found that kicking 85,000 hybrids out of the carpool lanes made all traffic slow down.
The study focused on a four-mile stretch of freeway in the San Francisco Bay Area near Hayward, but drivers in Los Angeles claimed they could have carried out the same research on the 405 Freeway.
Regular car drivers said that taking hybrids out of the carpool lanes has unintentionally slowed traffic for everyone.
“Taking it away and throwing 50,000 more drivers on the 405 Freeway that’s completely congested? It’s obvious what it does to traffic,” said Santiago Vasquez as he pumped gasoline at a Granada Hills service station.
Los Angeles County has 500 miles of carpool or diamond lanes and a Caltrans study last year noted that 34 percent of all traffic on the freeway moves in carpool lanes. That was about 800,000 cars a day.
Now, the local carpool lanes have several hundred fewer hybrids in them—cars that are now helping to clog the regular lanes.
“I was never overcrowded and I drove from Simi to downtown in a regular car,” said Denise Kolm.
“There were a lot of new hybrids coming out so I think they should have just kept them there,” Moses Andrade said.
That would free up the rest of the lanes for other drivers, Andrade added.
Caltrans claimed the Berkeley study was not long enough since it only evaluated six months of data and the state preferred to analyze a whole year of carpool information so that year-to-year trends could be noted.
Caltrans also contended factors such as gasoline prices and the economy have to be considered before reaching conclusions about traffic flow.
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