James Oberstar: “The purpose of the HOV lanes is to encourage more people to ride in a car than to continue encouraging single-occupancy…”

“The purpose of the HOV lanes is to encourage more people to ride in a car than to continue encouraging single-occupancy vehicle travel. Now, the idea of an exemption for hybrid vehicles was to encourage their development, their production, and that is happening in California, to the great credit of that State. So now we are seeing sort of the hybrid vehicle production take off. But in that process, the principle of HOV lanes seems to be falling behind, with more single-passenger vehicles traveling. So the language of the gentleman's amendment is not perfectly clear. We would be willing to accept language that makes it clear that the State can choose to exempt a hybrid vehicle, not that they are required to exempt.”