HOV 3 lanes should be open to workers with mobile job sites

In January, HOV lanes on Interstate 25 and U.S. 36 switched to HOV 3, meaning vehicles must have at least three occupants to use the lanes. This is of concern for laborers for whom carpooling or taking the bus is not an option.

For many folks who go to work at the same place every day, the main obstacle to getting involved in a carpool may be simply making the effort to coordinate with a coworker. For others, it may be finding an appropriate bus route if one exists. Personally, I take the bus to and from work every day and am glad that I don’t have to deal with traffic and that I have the opportunity to do a little reading.

But consider the people whose workplace changes every day: plumbers, landscapers, cleaners, electricians. For these workers, arranging a carpool is impractical — many job sites don’t require enough people at a time to even satisfy the HOV 3 requirements. Small businesses working in these industries may not even have that many employees.

I understand some reasons why HOV 3 would make sense. It provides an additional revenue stream, it reduces transit time variance, and it incentivizes people to take more efficient modes of transportation.

It seems to me that not only is it not particularly fair to service people, but there is an economic disincentive to forcing them to sit in slower traffic. While for salaried employees, additional commute time is an annoyance, for service people and other wage workers it is an economic burden, as it represents time when they otherwise might be at a job site. And even beyond their personal finances, they represent a large pool of workers who would be contributing to the economy if not stuck in traffic. That is not true of people who work jobs with predictable hours in predictable locations — the same group of people who are good candidates for organizing and participating in carpools.

We should remove this burden from service industry laborers and enjoy the benefits of their additional economic throughput by making free or discounted tolls available to vehicles that qualify (as in, are used exclusively for work in the service industry where the job site changes regularly).

Depending on the volume of cars associated with such service industry work, it seems additional lanes could be opened up to a shared HOV 3/service worker system. That would still keep the commute time variance low for those using the lanes, would still provide a revenue stream (from those who choose to subsidize this program by paying to use these lanes), and would continue to encourage commuters to arrange carpools or use public transit whenever possible.