The important part is to get money from commuters for higher salaries, pensions and other benefits for transportation agency employees.

The best thing to do is to try and get cars off 101 by improving public transportation.

What happened about the VTA pilot of fast buses using carpool lanes from Gilroy and Morgan Hill to Mountain View?

We need these fast buses from outlying residential areas to Silicon Valley hubs where they are met by local shuttles.

We need fast buses to get to the airports, to cross Dumbarton and San Mateo bridges, to Daly City Bart. If Google can transport employees by fast, efficient buses from outlying areas as well as from San Francisco, then why can't other operators do the same for the rest of us?

We need more innovative ideas and out of the box thinking when it comes to commuting around the Bay Area.

Clearly, local companies are expanding much faster than our infrastructure can support them. We need a higher payroll tax to pay for all the services that these workers use, like improved roads and public transit. These companies are making billions of dollars in revenue and can afford to put some of that back into their local communities.

In my view Toll Lanes - no matter what they’re called - increase congestion.

First, they increase congestion for the people in the other lanes. That’s another way of phrasing “encouraging commuters to carpool and use transit.” I think the better way to encourage people to use transit is to create better transit, but even if we improve transit there are people whose transportation requirements make public transit impractical. Think of the gardener who carries a lawnmower and other equipment in the back of his/her pickup truck. He/she will have to suffer the slowdown or pay up. Or there are the parents who must drive alone on the freeway to pick up their kids from school or soccer practice.

Second, toll lanes are designed to allow more people to commute in single-occupancy vehicles. Those are the people who will pay the tolls. If the traffic management systems work right, those toll-payers will glide comfortably up the freeway, but what happens when they pour off the freeway? They will jam surface roadways. Toll lanes would work against Mountain View’s transportation demand management programs, which are designed to get people out of single-occupancy vehicles.

The real attraction, to transit agencies, is that toll lanes could generate funds to improve public transit. But there is an alternative. Instead of extracting tolls from drivers already burdened by the high cost of working in Silicon Valley, we could tax the extremely wealthy corporations whose success is responsible for much of our traffic problems.

The title should of been "How to milk the wealthy out of more money". Of course leaving the poor to deal with the traffic.

I'm okay with carpool lanes and I'm even okay with toll lanes. Electric vehicles, however, should not get a free pass to use these lanes.

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