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Absent the HOV lanes, commuting would have doubled my one hour commute.

HOV lanes are infrastructure rationing. Once you concede the principle that public roadways are free for all to use, you've made yourself the plaything of the power junkies and policy wonks.

What do you do when they jack up the HOV requirement to 4+, then 6+, then 21+ (buses only!)? You're screwed. You've let your public servants take away

Your right to travel
Your right to go out of your house (since they "own" all the streets)
Your right to get a living
Your right to go shopping, or anywhere else.

HOV lanes will wind up being the big-shots-only lanes that Hedrick Smith described in his book The Russians.

Build the roads, stop playing games. Double-deck them if need be. Build them, stop trying to screw the public. And quit trying to pump up downtown real-estate values artificially by luring all the big employers downtown with tax abatements.

HOV lanes are all about killing commuting so that people will be forced to move back into the cities -- so their paychecks can be recycled in the form of sky-high rents. Pres. Bush is trying to help the Old Money replicate the Tokyo labor-cost recycling model here in America -- turning the big cities into company towns. Great for the big-rich stockholders and well-heeled managers, high-rent tenement hell for their employees.

Wow. Down here is So Cal they are building high density apartment complexes like you wouldn't believe. They are literally all over the place. I drive past them every day. I have wondered what was driving that. Its all part of the plan to "get us out of our cars" lie, and to make money off of us. That old song, " I owe my soul to the company store," will have new meaning, won't it?

As to HOV, I use it every day, but not for work. I stay at home, my hubby's job is 10 minutes away form our house. What am I doing? I drive my daughter to ballet every day, five days a week. If this goes though, it will be a tax on my daughter's passion to someday have a chance to be a ballet dancer. And it keeps her fit. Gads. But at least I tell her that everyone on that road with us has paid for the HOV lane we drive in. They have as much right to that lane as we do.

History tells us that there is simply no way to build roads fast enough to keep up with the growth of traffic.

Roads are a unique element of public infrastructure in that they induce additional demand above and beyond what they were originally designed to accommodate. Instituting a "user fee" on a road is no different than having a public utility charge variable rates for electricity based on when demand is highest and lowest.

Exactly, I seem to remember some city, I think it was Chicago, considering converting its HOV lanes to general traffic. There was a study by UCal-Berkely (of all places) showing that HOW lanes actually increase congestion. For years now the left has wanted to discourage the private ownership and use of automobiles by individuals, largely in an effort to promote a more "European" urban lifestyle. After all, with public mass transit, the government has effective control over when and where you can travel, work, and live.

What do you do when they jack up the HOV requirement to 4+, then 6+, then 21+ (buses only!)? You're screwed. You've let your public servants take away

Your right to travel
Your right to go out of your house (since they "own" all the streets)
Your right to get a living
Your right to go shopping, or anywhere else.

A man's home is his castle (for now). The rest of the world is hostile to that notion.

You can now work and shop from home. But the downtown boys still want their money from the property taxes on your castle to pay for their billion dollars in sports stadiums.

Here in Memphis we have a couple of miles of HOV lanes and I as well as most people in this city drive in this lane all the time alone in the car. My taxes paid for that lane and I should be able to use it. I went to L.A. and they have the HOV lane and I couldn't believe during the hellish rush hour that this lane was pretty much open. If that had been Memphis that lane would have been just as full as the others because no one here obeys and it is not very well inforced. While in L.A. I took my chances and jumped in and out of the HOV lane and got on up the road. :)

I disagree with your theory that HOV lanes are a part of forcing people away from commuting. In fact, the HOV allowed me to live farther from work (where I could afford to buy a home), instead of living closer in where the houses were either smaller or schools were worse. HOV is about reducing the number of cars on the road. Because they are reversible (In N.VA.), they don't waste space where regular highway would be built wider.
More roads may be necessary, but I say build HOV as well.
It worked for me.

The HOV lanes we're talking about are in Northern Virginia on a stretch of the busiest piece of Interstate in the nation (I think only I70 on the Eastside of Indianapolis is busier).

This is highly developed urban space ~ widening the highway would probably cost something in terms of billions of dollars per mile.

There really isn't somewhere else to put the highways!

As far as double-decking is concerned, the subsurface around here is disaggegated schist leftover from a massive meteor strike tens of millions of years ago. It's been infilled with wind blown loess.

The few spots where the Metro-line (the local "subway system") had to be built "overhead" were incredibly expensive ~ "mindboggling" actually.

Regarding the HOV rules, the system started out requiring "buses only", then HOV-4 was allowed, and finally HOV-3.

What you neglected to account for was the fact that drivers learn to use the system and highway management learns to deliver the service, and working together everyone improves the efficiency of the operation thereby allowing lighter loads per vehicle.