Too Many Hybrids? | Green Energy News

January 2, 2005 – Vol.9 No.41

TOO MANY HYBRIDS?

As a way to improve air quality and encourage the purchase of clean fuel, low emission vehicles, transportation authorities in Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC have been allowing drivers of hybrid cars to travel in High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV-3) lanes on highways leading to Washington DC.

Commuters have been buying hybrids just to be able to use the less congested lanes.

The lanes themselves were devised to reduce pollution and congestion by encouraging car-pooling. A car with three passengers emits a third of the pollution of three cars with one person each. The congestion reduction is the same.

Now so many hybrids are driving in the HOV-3 lanes that those lanes are becoming congested themselves - congested with hybrids.

State transportation officials and a few advocacy groups (whose members don’t drive hybrids but drive conventional cars with seats full) want the hybrid allowance rescinded before its expiration date of June 2006.

The law allowing low-emission vehicles to drive in HOV lanes was approved in 1994 long before the first hybrids came into the marketplace. No one then could have recognized the popularity of the technology. By the end of 2004 there were 6800 hybrids in Northern Virginia displaying clean fuel tags which allow them to run in the HOV lanes.

Virginia has the most registered hybrid cars outside of California. Will sales drop in the area if hybrids are forced back into the stop and go world of single occupancy cars? We’ll see.