Photo from Andre Alforque via Flickr

Hybrid owners in Los Angeles haven’t just been saving gas and money thanks to their choice in cars: They’ve also been saving time. That’s because of a law that allows hybrid cars to ride in the carpool lanes, even when there’s only one person in the car. But the Los Angeles Times reports that the law was changed last Friday, forcing hybrid owners back into the regular lanes. Conventional car owners couldn’t be happier, as evidenced by one carpooler who was interviewed:

“I figure it’s cheating—like, ‘Why do they get the special pass?’ Plus there’s a gazillion hybrids on the road now,” he said. Carpoolers are “the ones really making an impact by relieving traffic and saving mileage by having three people in the car. We figure we’re doing the admirable thing and those guys are kind of cheating.”

Although his estimate of the number of hybrids on the roads of L.A. is off by a few (it’ s actually 85,000, not a gazillion) it’ s hard to argue with the logic that three people in a car that gets 30 MPG. is actually a greener alternative than one person in a car that gets 60 MPG. Carpoolers are also happy to see the hybrids go because they claim that hybrid owners tend to drive slower in order to increase fuel efficiency. Combine the high number of hybrids on the road and their supposedly slow driving speeds, and it’s easy to see why hybrids are the first to get the blame when carpool lanes are clogged to a crawl at rush hour.

But will removing the hybrids really make a difference? Marco Ruano, chief of freeway
operations for L.A., doesn’t think so:

“To have a measurable impact on traffic, you really need to talk about significant changes in volume or demand, and this isn’t big enough to really create any significant change one way or the other to either the [high-occupancy vehicle] lanes or the general-purpose lanes,” Ruano said.

The hybrid’s carpool passes are being revoked to compensate for 40,000 new passes that will be issued next year to owners of plug-in hybrids and electric cars, to encourage commuters to purchase the latest fuel efficient vehicles. That means that any drop in traffic now will be corrected in 2012 when the next generation of sustainable vehicles nudge their way back into the lanes. Not to mention the fact that roads, like nature, abhor a vacuum; if the carpool lanes really do get less crowded then more carpoolers will appear to pick up the slack.

Carpool commuters in L.A. shouldn’t expect their drive to get smoother any time soon. But at least some of them might then be encouraged to switch to mass transit, right?

Um, maybe not.