High Occupancy Vehicle Lanes

The longest continuous stretch of carpool lanes in the state is now open for motorists driving a 50-mile stretch between Diamond Bar and San Clemente. Two high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes opened Friday and today on the Orange Freeway between the Birch Street under-crossing in Brea to the Orange Freeway and Pomona Freeway interchange.

A day after he signed the papers on his new metallic-blue Honda Civic hybrid, Steve Giang was rushing Thursday to file a different kind of paperwork. Like many hybrid owners, Giang was seeking special decals from the state allowing him to take advantage of a top perk of owning the fuel-efficient car: the right to drive solo in freeway carpool lanes.

Legislation to end an unsuccessful carpool lane experiment and restore the status quo to the El Monte Busway cleared its first legislative hurdle Tuesday, but not without some nail biting. Dubbing his own carpool lane experiment a failure, Assemblyman Bob Margett (R-Arcadia) pleaded with the Senate Transportation Committee to undo legislation he helped carry last year that has turned the once reliable busway into a parking lot. "We should admit we made a mistake," Margett said.

Only Southern California would mark the opening of congestion-clearing carpool lanes with a traffic-stopping parade of classic cars. That is precisely what transportation officials did Thursday to celebrate the long-awaited closure of a six-mile gap in the San Diego Freeway carpool lanes between the Harbor and Long Beach freeways, creating the longest stretch of continuous carpool lanes in Southern California--59.5 miles, from Los Angeles International Airport to San Juan Capistrano.

Genoveva Arellano knows traffic on the Pomona Freeway is about to slow down when the double white lines marking the carpool lanes suddenly disappear near Diamond Bar. The next 11 miles -- between the 57 and 605 freeways -- are by far the toughest stretch of her sometimes two-hour trek from her home in Chino Hills to downtown Los Angeles.

Motorists who drive solo in fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles will gain access to carpool lanes in California under a massive transportation bill approved by Congress on Friday that includes billions of dollars for projects statewide. The $286.5-billion bill, the first major transportation funding measure since 1998, cleared the House and Senate by large bipartisan votes.

More than a decade after launching the state's largest network of carpool lanes, Orange County's top transportation leaders on Monday called for a one-year study to determine if the lanes actually work. The board of the Orange County Transportation Authority set aside a staff recommendation to embrace the Garden Grove Freeway project--the final unfinished segment in the state's premier system of diamond lanes--and unanimously called for a study of how the lanes affect congestion.

They're big. They're ugly. They're offensive. So say owners of the hybrid Toyota Prius -- not about larger gas-guzzlers that hog the road but about the decals the state is handing out that allow hybrid owners to drive solo in carpool lanes. Prius owners cheered when Congress approved solo driving in carpool lanes last month.

In a report likely to generate renewed debate about the merits of carpool lanes in Orange County and throughout the state, a new legislative analysis concludes that California's 925 miles of the restricted lanes are underused and have not persuaded drivers to change their habits.