COMMUTER LANES RANT: Catholic Exchange has republished the commuter lanes rant I wrote for the back page of Sport Z magazine last year. And yes, I really did try to give the appearance of busting a blood vessel when I wrote it. Picture Alec Baldwin in full "let's stone Henry Hyde!!!" mode, except hopefully slightly more literate.

Of course, to the average person, “government” in the U.S. means “elected officials”. But commuter lanes weren’t the result of elected officials. They were the result of faceless bureaucrats in Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation. As Joan Didion describes in her book The White Album, Caltrans introduced commuter lanes in the late 1970s to initially turn the 240,000 cars that traverse the Santa Monica freeway every day into 232,000. Naturally, after screwing up that freeway, Caltrans spent an initial 42 million dollars of taxpayer money to begin the initial screwing of the rest of the state’s freeways.

And for that money, what did we get? The main results from commuter lanes are to make the people driving in them feel oh so superior to the single drivers to their right; and to make the people driving alone feel like worthless worms, stuck in traffic thick with constipation, unable to move, while a handful of cars scream past them.

One of the things I tried to do when I wrote it, was to express a libertarian, less government, less bureaucracy point of view, without bludgeoning people over the head with a lecture as to why an over-regulated society is bad. It's not easy to write a piece on why ham-handed social engineering is bad for an automobile magazine, but hopefully my piece did the trick.