March 2006
Car-Share Initiative Started In West Yorkshire
The first car-share lane to be built on a UK motorway has been given the go-ahead by the government.
Transport Secretary Alistair Darling has announced that the one-mile (1.6km) lane will open in 2007 at the junction of the M606 and M62 in West Yorkshire.
It will allow cars carrying more than one person priority entry from the M606 southbound onto the eastbound M62.
The £2.5m lane, on the busy route between Bradford and Leeds, will cut rush-hour journeys by eight minutes on average. Single-occupant vehicles would not suffer from additional delays and should also benefit from improved journey times, the Highways Agency said.
Government plans
A second such lane will open in 2008 on the M1 between junction 7, near Hemel Hempstead, and junction 10, in Luton.
That forms part of a planned widening scheme with work, which begun on Monday, expected to take about 32 months to complete.
Theory behind car-share lanes
Car-share lanes distinguish between the single-occupancy and high-occupancy vehicles travelling on the road.
The relative rarity of high-occupancy vehicles compared to single-occupancy vehicles make car-share lanes work for the drivers who can use them. When it is un-congested, a car-share lane can move at full speed even when parallel (regular) lanes suffer delays from queuing at bottlenecks. In theory, an car-share lane moves more people per lane at a higher speed while moving fewer vehicles.
A single engine carrying multiple passengers uses less fuel per trip, saving money and creating less pollution than if each passenger drove their own car. In other words, car-share lanes are supposed to encourage people to share journeys or take public transport that utilizes the car-share lane.
Car-share lanes abroad
Car-share lanes have already been implemented in countries such as the USA, Canada and Australia.
Practises for implementing car-share lanes include:
- Labelling of specific lanes on highways and interstates for high-occupancy only (known as car-pool lanes or diamond lanes in the United States)
- The use of the hard-shoulder as a car-share lane (though often only used by public transport)
- Reversible lanes – where different traffic is permitted in different directions depending on the time of day.
- Entire roads becoming car-share only a certain times of day.
‘Slugging’
One symptom of car-share lanes that refutes the contention that car-share lanes are not effective has been the slugging phenomenon of the Washington DC metro area.
"Slugging" is the term used to describe a unique form of commuting where drivers go to pre-arranged "slug lines" and pick up commuters who need a ride. The driver shouts out his destination, and people in the line going to that destination enter the car in a first come first serve basis.
There is very specific etiquette to the system to ensure a fair, consistent, and agreeable commute for all. Slugging benefits drivers by enabling them to use the car-share lane, benefits "sluggers" by getting them rides, and benefits the community by decreasing the number of cars on the road. It however also carries most of the risks and problems of hitch-hiking.
Print this page