Featured California removes PHEV Green HOV Sticker Limit

The first stickers in California, expired mid 2011, were yellow. The goal, in large part, was to encourage the purchase/lease of new low emission vehicles like the Prius Liftback to improve air pollution.

Later came the green stickers (PHEV) and white stickers (BEV + other alternative fuel vehicles) that we have now.

While incentivizing low/no CO2 emission vehicles is a laudable goal, giving away HOV access as noted has probably been a poor way of going about it, largely defeating the benefits/purpose of HOV lanes.

That said, it probably makes more sense to actual cite the numerous violators in HOV lanes first before removing the HOV access priviledge for plug-in vehicles.

 

and make the fines pay for the increased enforcement.

 

It's probably more than that. Traffic citations are insanely overpriced in California. I got a red light ticket in Boston once, and couldn't believe when the cop gave me the ticket and it only said $50. Red light tickets cost over $500 in California, and most other traffic tickets hover around that price if not higher.

 

HOV lane violation ticket is a minimum $490 fine.​

HOV

 

if you're talking about running a red light in ma, 3 moving violations = loss of license. not sure about current ticket fine.

 

Here are some interesting HOV "scofflaw" details: California carpool cheating, tickets are on dramatic rise – The Mercury News

Hefty carpool tickets are being handed out in the Bay Area like never before, and the reason is clear: More solo drivers are cheating than ever....risking a $491 fine. An average of 41 percent of drivers on Santa Clara County’s expressways were cheating in the diamond lanes at 28 locations the county monitored. That’s nearly double the number of scofflaws from five years ago...

Motorists have been yelping for years that cheating is rampant on almost every freeway. But the state often insisted those claims were overstated, and that a growing number of solo drivers had clean-air stickers, making them eligible to go solo in the HOV lane...

Metropolitan Transportation Commission positioned traffic counters at numerous overpasses...For weeks, men and women in green and orange vests sat overhead on lawn chairs to provide the most detailed count in years of how many people were inside each vehicle passing below...No surprise, said countless drivers.

“Interstate 680 south from Benicia to Walnut Creek during the morning commute is loaded, and I mean loaded, with one-person vehicles,” said Dixie Sala, of Martinez...

“Every night I see about 40 percent one-passenger cars in the carpool lane zooming by 98th Avenue in Oakland,” said Wayne Krider, of Castro Valley...

But it’s the threat of a cop watching for cheats that’s the big hammer.


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Good to know if attention needs to be directed towards a particularly bad area, though it sounds like its a very big problem everywhere:

“Officers generally target enforcement on trouble areas that we receive complaints.”


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This is what people who complain about the HOV Sticker program clogging the carpool lanes fail to see. The number of PHEV/BEV solo drivers in carpool lanes is tiny compared to the number of non-PHEV/BEV solo drivers.

As per SB-838:
SEC. 20. (b) The number of low-emission and zero-emission vehicles currently on the road in California represents a small portion of overall registered vehicles, less than 1 percent.
SEC. 20. (c) The Department of Transportation has reported that prior traffic counts indicate that low-emission and zero-emission vehicles contribute a very small percentage of the peak hour high-occupancy vehicle lane volume, under 5 percent of vehicles in those lanes.
Source: Bill Text - SB-838 Transportation.

 

The new sticker rule rational just got weirder. At their core, all laws have to be rationally related to the objective that they purport to achieve. I'm really struggling to find a rational basis for this rule though;

http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1105760_ca-plug-in-carpool-lane-access-bill-up-for-vote-heres-why-some-oppose-it
Is that not just deliberately excluding the most likely buyers of Tesla? Putting the minimum down on a house in many south OC, Calif areas means your house payments alone will be far north of $5K a month + an equal amount for property tax. IE, a $$ boat load just for housibg. So where's the rational basis for keeping out the longest distance car, that's most likely to have zero smog impact - the one mist likely to NOT even use grid power for that matter? Guess they'll just have to take their gas burning land barge to work in stead.

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Wow, that is hefty. Omg!

 

Fixed link - 2016 August, green car Congress reports the same thing.
Both 2013 & 2016 legislation insist that Tesla 'get'. The legislative sponsor - the Association of auto manufacturers (gm, toyota, et al) really HATES that manufacturer tesla for not being one of its members. What better way to punish the outlier while simultaneously benefiting their own (phev's) - and simultaneously looking like you're not trying to favor those who are perceived to have more than the average Joe.
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my mistake - i thought i'd seen the language carried over to the new proposal. Whew! a moment of legislative sanity ... likely to the chagrin of the auto manufacturers' nice person'n. Now all they need to do is enforce the new rules by citing the 40% or so abusers.
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HOV

"HOV lane violation ticket is a minimum $490 fine. Fine may be higher for repeat offender. In addition, at the discretion of the county's Board of Supervisors, local counties can assess additional administrative fees."​

I say after all interested parties add their fees, you are probably looking at a $600+ ticket, for a first time offense.

 

Baaah !! A few hundred bucks? That's nothing. Problem is you just don't have the millions & millions to make it look like small change. Would you believe one certain individual pays around $40,000 a year in tickets?

He Parks His Car Wherever He Wants
Last year our tickets to watch him in Vegas cost a couple hundred bucks. Now I know what he spent it on. Must be nice to not be one of us little people

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he hates looking for parking spaces, but doesn't mind spending hours getting his car out of the tow lot?

 

Nah - he pays his people to do that . . .
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He has another Porsche(several if it is who I think it is) to drive while his assistant does that.