HOV: High Octane Ventures

As a transportation engineer, my eyes seem to trap more news stories involving cars, trains and anything remotely related to this field. Here is an example: in a span of just a few days, I chanced upon two articles involving the misuse of HOV traffic lanes.

High Occupancy Vehicle lanes are specially marked highway lanes restricted to vehicles with at least two occupants. These lanes are usually identified by the series of diamond-shaped symbols painted along their length. The motivation for such an idea is simple: provide a lane with fewer vehicles (and thus less congestion), which could force more people to share cars to and from work. In essence, they can potentially reduce the number of cars on the road. Resulting benefits could be widespread, and include reductions in travel delays, fuel consumption, emissions and accidents.

One woman was recently arrested for driving all by herself in an HOV lane. When she was hauled to court, she defended her action by claiming that her yet-to-be-born child was the second occupant! The judge threw her case out, and forced her to cough up the fee.

In a second incident, a man in the HOV lane was caught by a patrolling police officer because he had a fully-clothed dummy in the seat next to him! The officer apparently observed this car over several days, and noticed the same guy (in the same clothes, too) riding along!

All of this reminds me of my friend's account of innovative sellers in Greece, who marketed a plain white T-shirt with a single black band going across it - to "simulate" a seat belt! The idea was to attract drivers who were averse to wearing them, but (obviously) did not want to get caught.