NY Times writer John Tierney thinks allowing hybrids in the car pool lane will lead to a slippery slope sliding into an environmental hell. Here is an excerpt:
“But even if these new privileges put more fuel-efficient cars on the road, I’m afraid the net effect will be dirtier air and more gasoline consumption. The promoters of hybrids are committing the sin identified by the ecologist Garrett Hardin in “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the 1968 essay providing one of the foundations of environmentalism.
The essay’s title refers to a pasture that’s commonly owned and open to all. Since every individual has an incentive to increase his own herd, the pasture will eventually be destroyed by overgrazing, just as other types of unregulated commons – the ocean, the atmosphere – will be damaged by overproduction and pollution when too many individuals pursue their own goals.
This seems like an obvious lesson, Hardin wrote, but it must be “constantly refreshed” because each new generation repeats the mistake. As an example of “how perishable the knowledge is,” he pointed to politicians in a Massachusetts town who declared that people didn’t have to pay at parking meters during the Christmas shopping season. By giving away the spaces at a time of peak demand, the town encouraged some people to hog spaces and left everyone else unable to park.
That’s the same mistake being made with hybrids. In Virginia, where they’ve been allowed for years in the car pool lanes, the lanes have become so clogged that an advisory committee has repeatedly recommended their banishment. The same problem will occur in California, where some of the car pool lanes were congested even without hybrids.
As traffic slows down, there will be more idling cars burning more gas and emitting more pollution, but politicians will be reluctant to offend hybrid owners by revoking their privilege. So it will be harder than ever to make the one change proven to speed up traffic and help the environment: convert the car pool lanes into what engineers call high-occupancy toll lanes.”– John Tierney THE ROAD TO HELL IS CLOGGED WITH RIGHTEOUS HYBRIDS
Here in Van Nuys 
So his point is – what? That we’re doomed to overconsume all the natural resources and do ourselves in? Then the Rapture comes, and we’ll go to heaven once the world is unliveable with our filth?
I commented on your other post about the hybrid stickers – and I think people, and this guy, are missing the point about it. The hybrid car pool lane sticker is an incentive for people to buy hybrid cars, as was the $2000 tax break you got from buying one a couple of years ago. That program is gone, and the carpool lane stickers are gone as well. I doubt California will be issuing many more, especially since there will be more hybrids on the road as manufacturers produce more.
Also, as I mentioned in the other post, the hybrid gets twice the gas mileage as the average for American cars (21 MPG), and produces less emissions. You get at least one car off the road when two drivers carpool in a regular car. Do the math – let’s say the Prius gets 44 MPG, more than twice the average – along with the reduced emissions, that’s half a car on the road. That does in effect accomplish the same purpose as carpooling.
Ideally, it would all be best if we had cars that didn’t consume any gas or produce emissions at all, as do electric or solar powered vehicles. But automakers aren’t going there. What I simply don’t understand is, why people are trying to discount efforts to pollute less and consume less gas, however small it is, especially considering that gas prices are about to hit $3 a gallon?
I remember the days I was in elementary school here in the 70s, you couldn’t go outside for recess sometimes because the air was too polluted. Thanks to efforts to reduce emissions in California, that’s not that much of a problem anymore.
But who cares about kids and everybody else? I want to drive my damn Hummer! Pollute! Pollute!
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