{"id":3090,"date":"2005-08-30T21:16:41","date_gmt":"2005-08-31T01:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/08\/30\/3090.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:03","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:03","slug":"another-common-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/08\/30\/another-common-tragedy\/","title":{"rendered":"Another common tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I made a note of John Tierney’s column in this morning’s Times, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why I thought this piece of drivel was worth blogging. It’s called The Road to Hell Is Clogged With Righteous Hybrids<\/a>, and as you can imagine, it’s filled with the sort of sneering at “those of us virtuous enough to drive the right hybrids.” As a recent passenger in one of those hybrids, YHB is pretty sure that, um, well, whatever. Should Mr. Tierney choose to pay twice as much per mile for his ride, that’s fine with me. I’m sure it’s no reflection on his character.\n

The actual policy matter that occasions Mr. Tierney’s sneers is the decision to open High-Occupancy Vehicle lanes to high-mileage cars. He states that “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.” Um, why? Because with so many cars in the HOV lanes, the HOV lanes will get clogged, and those backed-up cars will idle, burning gas and causing pollution. This, you see, is the Tragedy of the Commons. Perhaps that’s why I flagged it, although the writer doesn’t totally misuse the TotC. He does have people acting in somewhat perplexing ways; I’m not sure why, once the HOV lane gets clogged, it remains in people’s interest to take it. I would guess that’s a Nash Equilibrium situation, where after a while, a new status quo sets in, with more (and slower) cars in the HOV lane, but that lane still moving slightly faster than the other lanes. Perhaps the equilibrium won’t set in until the HOV lane is essentially no faster than the others, which would remove the incentive for carpooling, but since nobody carpools anyway<\/I>, I can’t say I’d get all weepy about that.\n

Oh, and Mr. Tierney? I know you say you’ve been driving a Prius, but you somehow missed the most obvious thing about it. It doesn’t idle. It doesn’t idle<\/I>. Four days ago, Your Humble Blogger was stuck in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, and used up, oh, about, let’s see, six drops of gas in the half-hour I was waiting to see the car fire. Yes, the battery did get a bit run down, but it seems to have topped itself back up, and we got 45-50 mpg on the trip. A traffic jam of Priussessii wouldn’t be much fun to be in, but it wouldn’t involve a whole heck of a lot of gas and pollution. Or noise.\n

Anyway, Mr. Tierney’s preferred alteration to the HOV lane is to convert it to an HOT lane, which has the advantage of a far better acronym (does anybody actually pronounce it huhv? or hohv?). HOT stands for high-occupancy toll, which does not, as one might imagine, charge a toll for those with high-occupancy, but rather allows low-occupancy cars into the lane for a consideration. There are obvious logistical problems, it seems to me. You can’t use an EZ-Pass kind of thing, unless individuals have them embedded in their persons, since there would be no way of knowing whether a car is high- or low-occupancy on a given trip. So every car would have to stop to pay the toll (or get a head count and be waved through). Mr. Tierney’s suggestion of setting tolls by the weight of the vehicle also would require a weigh station, adding to the length of the stop, but feasible enough. Mr. Tierney allows that one could give a discount to hybrid engines, although he doesn’t see why we would want to.\n

Which, by the way, is where he totally misses the point, or pretends to, anyway. The HOV lane is not intended to decrease the pollution or gas consumption of the cars on it. It decreases the pollution and gas consumption of the cars left at home by the second and third occupants of the cars on it. It is a bribe. It is a government incentive to carpool, or take the bus, or otherwise waive your Right to Drive. If you act like a good citizen, the government will let you drive in this nice empty lane. Mr. Tierney doesn’t address the real point, which is that the State of California (and the State of Virginia, and a few others) are willing to bribe people to buy hybrids, because they have noticed that without the bribes, people don’t really want to buy hybrids. It’s fair to ask whether the state should care, or whether if the state does care it should act on that caring or stay out of the whole thing, sure. But he doesn’t do that. He just ignores the entire point of the policy. Perhaps it would be easier for him if we called it the bribe lane.\n

Should the state give the same bribe to hybrids as high-occupancy cars? OK, that’s a fair question. Should the state allow Hummer drivers to drive on the bribe lane for a fee? Er, why again?\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I made a note of John Tierney\u2019s column in this morning\u2019s Times, but I can\u2019t for the life of me figure out why I thought this piece of drivel was worth blogging. It\u2019s called The Road to Hell Is Clogged…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17506,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090\/revisions\/17506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}