Utah Legislators II

I saw this in the paper today. The Utah legislature wants to put the green lane to better use. You all are familiar with the green lane, it is the far left lane installed on our main thoroughfare, I-15, to relieve congestion and reward those who are conserving by car pooling. The theory is that when the traffic starts to back up during rush hour those cars with more than one person inside (dogs, dummies, blow up dolls and pregnant women are excluded) can use the green lane (they call it the HOV or High Occupancy Vehicle lane) to smuggly glide past those planet munching narsisists who have only themselves to talk to in their vehicle.

Now the forward thinkers (but if they are turned around and not looking ahead are they still forward thinkers?) are proposing a way for the single occupancy vehicle (SOV) to use the green lane. The first proposal I heard a year ago was that you could buy a month pass for $50 so you could buy your way into the HOV lane.

Way to go legislators. Why encourage conservation. Let's just see how much money we can wring from the selfish public. The planet will still be here when we run out of fossil fuel, why not get our part of the pie now. Each time we have a short fall in the budget we just build another lane onto the freeway and charge more. The next lane could cost $100 and then $200 and then $500. Balancing the budget could be a thing of the past.

Of course that would favor rich people so why not do something we call can pay for. Their latest scheme is to charge per ride. You have a transponder installed in your car and every time you want to go into the EOV (Elitist Occupancy Vehicle) lane you get charged. If the traffic in the other lanes is light you will get charged only $.50, as the traffic picks up the charge goes up to $1.00 or more. The article said they capped the charge at $1.00 for now because they didn't want to scare anyone away from using this option.

Does any one of our legisleezors think about any long term effects or are they so focused on the present that they can't see beyond the next fiscal year? I wish I lived in Oregon where kayaks are plentiful, people are concerned about the environment and green is not just the color of money.