Dispatch from Planet Delusional

Sometimes when I think about the many fine bloggers who toil away day after day without compensation, and the hacks who get paid for spouting stupidity, I just want to scream. If trees have to die to publish newspapers, I'd much rather they die for people like, oh, say, Digby....or Driftglass, or any of about a thousand others, than for the Babbling Idiot Known as John Tierney.

Today he tells us that hybrid cars pose an environmental danger:

As an example of "how perishable the knowledge is," he pointed to politicians in a Massachusetts town who declared that people didn't have to pay at parking meters during the Christmas shopping season. By giving away the spaces at a time of peak demand, the town encouraged some people to hog spaces and left everyone else unable to park.

That's the same mistake being made with hybrids. In Virginia, where they've been allowed for years in the car pool lanes, the lanes have become so clogged that an advisory committee has repeatedly recommended their banishment. The same problem will occur in California, where some of the car pool lanes were congested even without hybrids.

As traffic slows down, there will be more idling cars burning more gas and emitting more pollution, but politicians will be reluctant to offend hybrid owners by revoking their privilege. So it will be harder than ever to make the one change proven to speed up traffic and help the environment: convert the car pool lanes into what engineers call high-occupancy toll lanes.

These HOT lanes would be free for the truly virtuous commuters - those in car pools, jitneys and buses - and available to anyone else for a toll that would vary with demand. By enticing just enough drivers to maintain a steady flow of high-speed traffic, the HOT lanes could handle many more vehicles per hour than today's car pool lanes, which are usually either too empty or too congested to accommodate the optimum number.

With HOT lanes, everyone would come out ahead, drivers as well as environmentalists. As more drivers paid for a guaranteed speedy commute in the left lane, they would leave the regular lanes less clogged, so there would be fewer cars stuck in traffic jams, wasting gas and spewing fumes.

With HOT lanes, you could still encourage people to buy hybrids by promising them a discount on the tolls, but there's a fairer way to promote environmental virtue. Instead of arbitrarily rewarding a few cars for having a certain kind of engine, set tolls for all vehicles according to their weight. Since S.U.V.'s and other heavy vehicles require more room to brake, they need more empty pavement between them and the next car, and they should pay extra for it.

I realize that many Prius owners would rather have free privileges in the car pool lane than a discount in a HOT lane. But they'd be moving a lot faster, and they would still have one great satisfaction.

I wonder how late he had to stay up last night, and how much weed he had to smoke, to come up with this?