As we foresaw several weeks ago, the Star Ledger has launched a crusade to abolish NJ DOT's carpool lanes on I-287 and I-80.

This week, the paper ran a four-part "Lanes of Pain" series, authored by columnist John McLaughlin. The series kicked off on Sunday's front page.

The pieces were a lengthy articulation of the frustration experienced by drive-alone commuters who sit in traffic next to apparently empty carpool ("HOV") lanes. Some highway planners say the HOV lanes on I-80 are working, meaning that they carry (with much less delay) as many or more passengers per hour as one of the general use lanes. No one says the little-used I-287 HOV lanes (whose construction the Tri-State Campaign attempted to block in 1994, in no small part because a backlash to make the carpool lanes into additional highway lanes was predictable) are working.

Still, for all its bluster, the series was remarkably short on long-term solutions. Both NJDOT Deputy Commissioner Stan Rosenblum and the Campaign's Janine Bauer were cited saying that if the lanes were simply opened up to all cars, both highways would see four instead of three lanes of gridlock within five years.

At several points, the series raised the issue of opening the lanes to solo drivers who would pay tolls to use them ("high occupancy/toll lanes" - see MTR #'s 171 and 173), but the main thrust of the crusade is to simply decommission the lanes.

Our favorite part was a reader's comment that attacking HOV lanes in New Jersey was shooting fish in a barrel. The reader wanted to know when the Star Ledger would take on car-dependent sprawl development and the root causes of gridlocked highways.

The most sadly incongruous aspect of the series was the Ledger's editorial endorsement of Governor Whitman's proposal to hike gas taxes 5 cents to fund NJ's Transportation Trust Fund. The Governor's proposal would place no strictures on spending the money. So after four days of front page headlines decrying NJDOT's waste of hundreds of millions of dollars, the Ledger backs a big increase in the Dept's budget.