The Idiocy of Carpool Lanes
I hate rush hour almost as much as I hate Paris Hilton.
I understand that scientists believe that we are putting the earth into an oven and turning up the heat too high. I’m keeping their warnings in mind and making rational decisions with this information. When I have saved enough to make a down payment on a house, I’ll be looking for my beachfront property several miles inland.
While I realize the need to find solutions to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we burn, carpool lanes are a freaking idiotic solution that piss me off to no end. No matter how good carpool lanes may make tree huggers feel, the fact is that they promote global warming rather than help fight against it. Even a guy like me that spends most of his time drinking beer on a couch can see this. It’s a classic version of what the tree huggers want to happen versus reality.
Tree huggers argue that the car pool lanes will encourage people to drive with more than a single person in the car and thus take a car off the road, but fail to realize that driving with more than one person in a car is as unamerican as having a summer BBQ with generic food. It may be good in theory, but nobody is going to do it (well, except for my next door neighbor).
It’s a lot like lima beans when I was a kid. My mother would tell me how great the lima beans were for me and how they would make me grow up strong if I ate them. While this might have been true, there was no fricken way I was going to place those lima beans into my mouth. The fact is that people using carpool lanes like the tree huggers want is never going to happen no matter how much they want it to.
The result is a lot of wasted gas and money out of my pocket for no good reason. You have 4 highway lanes with bumper to bumper traffic crawling along wasting gas as they idle while the carpool lane has a huge SUV whiz by every few minutes at top speed, but otherwise empty. The cars bumper to bumper are wasting gas not moving and the SUV going at top speed isn’t helping the environment any either.
So in a futile situation like this, there was only one thing to do: secretly try to give the lima beans to the dog under the table and pass it off as if I had eaten them.
My first attempt to beat the system was to use my dog as my second person. When the cop pulled me over, I explained that I considered the dog a family member. The cop congratulated me and gave me a $250 ticket to celebrate.
Attempt number two was to try and convince the cop that my imaginary friend should count as the second person in the car. I guess I should feel lucky that all I got was the $250 ticket and not a week rest in the local mental institution.
Attempt number three with the sex blow-up doll actually worked the first time. The cop laughed so hard that he just walked back to the car and waved me on my way. I thought I’d found the perfect solution until the next cop that stopped me had right-wing family values instead of a sense of humor and I had another $250 ticket.
My sister says that I should just play by the rules, but that easy for her to say. She doesn’t have to play by the rules since she has a built free pass to the whole thing: a kid in a car seat. It’s nothing more than a huge carpooling loophole. The tree huggers championed carpool lanes to take cars off the road, not to give my sister a free ride in the carpool lane to get her kid to daycare or go shopping. It pisses me off not so much that she has found a loophole, but that she has found one that I can’t exploit as well, at least for the time being.
So I’m left with the following decision: waste gas, pollute the environment and lose time sitting with all the other cars in the traffic jam or risk getting a $250 ticket for wanting to save myself some gas, help relieve global warming and get to where I need to be a bit quicker. I wonder if getting a baby car seat and strapping in a doll would pass the lima bean test?
Image courtesy of Hysterical Bertha
Maybe if you spent more time on figuring out how to carpool rather than cheat the system, you could have saved yourself $750 in tickets. You deserved everything you got.
What you fail to realize is that if the carpool lane was opened up, it would be clogged with cars just as much as the other lanes and you wouldn’t get to work any faster.