Social Norms and Improving HOV Lane Violation Rates

-- By BrandonGe - 26 Feb 2010

Introduction

When I lived in Maryland, I picked up my mom from work everyday. With two people in the vehicle, we took advantage of the highway's high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane. On days when traffic was especially bad and the time saved by sneaking in a few miles in the HOV lane was especially great, I noticed that there would be a high number of solo commuters in the HOV lane; seeing a solo commuter for every multi-occupant vehicle was common. Police officers infrequently patrolled this particular stretch of the highway, and on the occasions when a police officer would be enforcing the HOV lane, he would virtually always be camped at the same spot. I often saw violators milk the benefits of driving in the lane until they switched back into an unrestricted lane before the predictable checkpoint.

This experience with poor HOV enforcement made me think about what makes enforcement so difficult, and what possible solutions are. In this paper I argue that because enforcement is so difficult and costly, creating social norms and stigmatizing cheating will be the driving force behind achieving compliance with HOV lane rules (a theory that has also been described by Professor Strahilevitz).

History and Benefits

HOV lanes were created in the 1960s and 1970s in response to rising foreign oil prices and the consequent desirability of lowering gas consumption. Creation of HOV lanes became popular among cities as a way of encouraging carpooling, thereby increasing person throughput and road capacity, and improving air quality. However, HOV lanes have been criticized as actually lowering road capacity and increasing overall congestion. Proponents point to the development of "slugging," an organized system of taking advantage of HOV lanes, as evidence of effectiveness.

The effectiveness of HOV lanes is a matter of great debate, one that is not the topic of this paper. This paper will proceed under the assumption that increased compliance with HOV lane rules is desirable.

Problems With Enforcement

HOV lane use is notoriously difficult to enforce, as evidenced by high violation rates throughout the country. A commonly proposed solution is devoting more patrol time to enforcement. This fails as a long-term solution. It can be difficult to see whether a particular vehicle is in compliance with HOV lane rules. Occupants such as babies and sleeping passengers are hard to see with the naked eye, especially when they are inside a fast-moving vehicle. Further complicating matters, some states, such as Arizona, have allowed owners of certain hybrid vehicles to apply for special license plates that let them use HOV lanes regardless of occupancy. Devoting more police officer time to enforcement can also be counterproductive. The draw of HOV lanes for potential carpoolers lies in their faster transit times, but police officers often slow traffic because many drivers slow down when they see a police car ahead. Lastly, many object to devoting valuable resources to enforcing relatively innocuous HOV lane violations.

Most alternatives are flawed. Barriers between HOV and unrestricted lanes can increase the effectiveness of police officer enforcement, but may lead to slower transit times in the HOV lane, as the effect of one slow driver is amplified. Also, the lower number of exits and entries for the HOV lane would discourage use even by carpoolers. Video and photographic surveillance is fraught with inaccuracies since it often cannot detect children and sleeping people.

Success of the FasTrak? Program

One successful solution has been the creation of a high occupancy toll (HOT) lane by allowing solo commuters the option to buy their way into the HOV lane. San Diego did this with their FasTrak? program, launched in 1996, and it has resulted in an increased number of carpoolers and decreased violation rate. Although patrol presence increased with the launch of the program, this cannot fully explain these successful results since historically, violation rates had not fallen and risen with the level of enforcement. What explains these results?

Social Norms

Social norms can be an effective, low-maintenance way of encouraging people to act in certain ways. In class discussion and in the literature, it has been suggested that social norms play a role in homeowners continuing payments even when it is advantageous to walk away. There is a social stigma attached to foreclosure. We have also seen this with seat belt laws. It was only a few decades ago when few people wore seat belts. But because of seat belt laws, use of seat belts became so widespread that now many people buckle up upon sitting in a car without thinking twice. Other examples of social norms people generally adhere to without enforcement include not cursing in front of children, recycling, and leaving a tip after a meal in a restaurant.

There is already a social deterrent from violating HOV lane rules in areas that have not implemented a program similar to FasTrak? . Violators frequently get dirty looks and honks from carpoolers. This, coupled with the volume of people a violator drives past during a traffic jam, can be a powerful deterrent for some (this is the main deterrent that I consider when driving solo). However, given the unpopularity and emptiness of many HOV lanes, there is still a high rate of violators who believe they are doing a social good in violating what they consider a stupid law.

The FasTrak? program has created a social norm against cheating. The popularity of the program, the stupidity of violation and risking hefty fines, and the availability of meaningful alternatives have helped create a community-wide stigma against violation. As violation rates decrease further, it becomes internalized that cheating is socially unacceptable, eventually reaching a point where people adhere to the rules voluntarily and with little enforcement. Guilt becomes the deterrent.

HOV lane enforcement is costly and ineffective. Thus, creation of a social norm that produces guilt in violators will be the main factor in improving nationwide compliance with HOV lane rules.

This isn't actually an essay that earns the conclusion you've put on it. What happened was that Strahilevitz wrote a too-clever-by-half piece designed to misuse a metaphor: he was going to prove the value of pollution emission permits by analogy with selling HOV lane access. You came along and took his HOV access material, his arguments, and his conclusion hook, line and sinker, including the social norms implications. But Strahilevitz is just a wise-ass law clerk, and he's writing a paper designed to get him a teaching job by sounding smart, so there's no reason to believe he's actually got a tight argument on his jumping-off point, which is just a metaphor anyway. When you come along and borrow this organ-grinder's monkey, you're now responsible for your data and your conclusions. So how about moving away from San Diego and DC, and looking at the San Jose metropolitan area, where the penalty for violating the HOV lane rules, like the penalty for littering on the coast highway, is heart-stoppingly high. If you charge people $1,000 for littering or $500 for driving under-loaded in HOV lanes, or for speeding in construction zones, you make even sporadic enforcement very effective, because the fines are larger than many drivers' cars are worth. You also create a good reason for the Highway Patrol to make enforcement of these rules a significant priority. That plus some points on the license, endangering the ability to make a living in a place that so utterly requires each worker to retain the privilege to drive, and you are likely to prevent behavior quite effectively. No significant littering happens on Highway 1, and at least in my experience with Silicon Valley traffic, HOV violation is very uncommon conduct.

So maybe you're right and maybe you aren't: perhaps there's data showing that San Diego does better than San Jose by some measurement we might be interested in (though it probably wouldn't do by some other measure of equal interest, because that's the problem with "policy science") but you're not even going to find that data as long as you're relying on Strahilevitz to do all your work for you. And whether the "social norm," which it might be simpler to call "other social control" is more powerful than law doesn't require extended analysis: law is always a fairly weak means of social control. If every church sermonized against HOV lane violation every Sunday, that would be more effective at deterring than high fines, though perhaps less effective than frequent public capital punishment. But other social control is not usually incompatible with legal social control, except in the thought experiments of smart-ass dudes trying to get a teaching gig at Chicago. There are other matters to consider: Whether enforcement is expensive, for example, depends on whether it pays for itself. And so on. Strahilevitz has a bunch of other problems, because he puts a ladder on top of this rickety stool and tries to climb many times higher than his head on it, but you've borrowed from him problems enough. Whether one wants to be responsible for this organ grinder's monkey isn't clear to me, but if you do, you need to ask some slightly broader questions and gather some slightly more comprehensive information.