The Privledged Few

We were in the southwest metro yesterday and noted a freeway entrance to an HOV lane. I couldn't remember what the acronym HOV stood for. Neither could Jon. The encyclopedia Google cleared that up this morning. According to MnDot, HOV = high occupancy vehicle. If you have two or more persons in your vehicle you qualify as high occupancy. High occupancy?

Daughter Mary and I went to Seattle eight or nine years ago. With two in our car we traveled in their designated lane for high occupancy vehicles. Don't remember if it is dubbed the sane lane or HOV lane or something else. We whizzed by stalled traffic on the clogged freeway during rush hour. In spite of the advantage of getting around more easily in rush hour, most of us still fly solo much of the time. That would include me.

Those HOV lanes are usually underused. It is annoying to be crawling along jammed up in traffic and see empty lanes. A few years ago MnDot turned some of our west metro HOV lanes into toll lanes. Pay and go. I am ignorant of the results of this program. Perhaps it relieved congestion. At least it gave people options.

Yesterday I heard of China's plan to relieve air pollution during the Olympic games. You can only drive every other day. Go by the last digit on the car's licence plate. Odd and even. That would reduce traffic by 50% if everyone played fair. I can imagine a blackmarket developing here to sell you an extra licence plate. Wouldn't magnetic plates over your old plates work?

China has had an authoritarian government. They regulate much of their citizens lives but haven't kept up enforcing traffic laws. Car ownership has exploded in recent years with a more affluent population. I heard 25% of the population has moved out of poverty into the middle class in the last decade. $$$ brought a desire to drive. More driving but without much regulation. Andy was in a town of 300,000 that had only one traffic light. It is free- for- all at the intersections with many accidents. You have to wonder how the new edict of odd and even driving will work. Perhaps it will. The people tend to comply.

If we ever have odd 'n even driving days what would we do with cars with vanity plates? One can only imagine what some of those plates would say. Expect to see some attitude expressed. Maybe we could let them use the HOV lanes. The rest of us stuck in crawling traffic would have time to scratch our heads trying to decipher what some of those acronyms on vanity plates mean.

Link :http://www-chaos.umd.edu/misc/plates.html click on "Vanity plates contest rules" for answer to what the plate on this blog means.