Cars are bad. The less people driving the better. We need to do everything we can to discourage driving. The more miserable we can making commuting the less likely people are to drive. Which is good. So that said, these HOV lanes should become permanent. We need to make driving so painful that people are forced to car pool where the wouldn't otherwise. If all these selfish drivers would put two more people in their car instead of just commuting all by themselves they'd have nothing to complain about, they'd be in the HOV lanes. Ideally we'd remove highways like the DVP and Gardiner entirely and replace with transit and bike lanes. But until them I'm so enjoying the 2 months of HOV hell that will snap drivers out of their dependency on the car. Driving must be discouraged at every possible opportunity and this is a GREAT start!
I think it's better not to villify drivers when we need their support for investment in other modes of transport. Pilloring the 71% of GTA commuters who travel by car is not a good way to win them to the cause, and talking about replacing the DVP with bike lanes is a sure way to convince even people who support public transit that you've gone off the deep end.
I hope that they keep these HOV lanes, even after the games are over. I know some drivers hate them, but they serve a good purpose:
1) They improve the response time of EMS vehicles. Everyone should be able to get behind this.
2) They have a higher through-put of people. When traffic grinds to a halt, having a lane that is still free-flowing means that people are still able to get to their destination. That's because congestion is a highly non-linear function of the number of vehicles in the lane, not the number of people taking it.
3) They provide an advantage to mass transit to put it on a more equal footing with personal automobiles. It is important that mass transit be competitive, otherwise even more people would be in their cars causing traffic.
4) They promote carpooling. As I mentioned in 2), the number of vehicles (not people) causes congestion. When a vehicle has 4 people in it, they cause 1/4th of the congestion that a SOV causes. If the average occupancy of vehicles on the highway doubled (from 1.3 to 2.6, not unreasonable) then imagine how smoothly traffic would flow with half the number of cars on the road!