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by ddddddddq 3477 days ago
How would you respond if someone replied with:

Yeah, but isn't it in the private roads' owners benefit to reduce congestion, so they create HOV lanes? And what if they want to promote certain kinds of cars like electric and hybrid and therefore allow them to drive in the HOV lanes? Shouldn't they be allowed to?

Edit: Not that I necessarily agree, but this seems like a flaw in the analogy.

2 comments

FWIW HOV lanes actually increase congestion in practice, because the benefit from getting a small number of additional people to carpool is less than the efficiency loss from operating the lane at less than its carrying capacity during congestion.

And the correct analogy for what they want to do is that the road company also owns a car company and is restricting the lanes you can use and charging higher tolls for not buying one of their cars, because they want to monopolize the car market.

That's more about advantaging certain type of traffic vs same type of traffic from different sources.