🚀 go-pugleaf

This whole argument about the Dulles HOV restrictions has a certain air of
unreality to it.  First off, it seems clear that the logic behind the
carpool advocates is flawed; the HOV lanes remain largely empty, and
therefore, for whatever reasons, people aren't carpooling.  It really
doesn't matter WHY they aren't carpooling, except to the extent that the
reasons can be altered.  Those who can't and those who won't are intractable
groups-- about the only group you can hope to help are those who want to
carpool and who are able to carpool but who cannot find a carpool.  I
suspect they are a rather small portion.

The main problem we have, in my opinion, is that the solutions that are
ordinarily brought forward-- mass transit and carpooling-- are really only
suitable for near suburban people who work downtown on a 9 to 5 basis.
Where I live now, everyone must own a car because it is impossible to get
anywhere on the weekends without one-- literally so.  It would take my wife
perhaps even several hours to get to her job from home because the bus
system doesn't really run that way, most of the time being lost in
transfers.  It takes me 45 minutes minimum to get to work on the bus for a
trip which, if driven, would be about 20 minutes.  Smug commuters (one
wonders how easy it is to carpool or take bus/subway to Carderock, for
instance) underestimate the diffculty other people have getting around, and
underestimate the difficulty others have in altering their jobs and their
obligations to fit them to the transit system or to a carpool.

People forget that, in the good old days, those people who didn't live in a
small town or a big city all had "cars" with four hooves.  NYC always had a
chronic problem dealing with all the horseshit-- literal horseshit.
-- 
C. Wingate        + "The peace of God, it is no peace,
                  +    but strife closed in the sod.
mangoe@cs.umd.edu +  Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing:
tove!mangoe       +    the marv'lous peace of God."