Here’s my column from the Sunday paper. If you’ve already read it elsewhere, please skip on down to the comments below. Thanks.

Alert reader Matthew from Hopkins has a question:

If I’m driving and my only passenger is my 4-month-old daughter, are we qualified to use the carpool lane? She is, after all, a second person in the car, albeit not a full-sized one.

To quote Dr. Seuss, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Those aren’t the exact words that the Federal Highway Administration uses in its rules for high-occupancy vehicle lanes, but that’s the basic idea, and Todd Kramascz, a supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, says the state’s policy aligns with the federal one.

There is one risk: Roadguy knows at least one dad who has been pulled over in the Interstate 394 carpool/toll lane by an officer who couldn’t see the second, much smaller person. No ticket was issued, but Matthew might want to give his kid a very large baby bonnet to improve her visibility.

TAKE HIM OUT TO THE BALLPARK

Alert reader Elbert called the other day from Andover because he’d like to take the bus to Twins games. With the price of gas what it is, he said, why couldn’t there be park-and-ride service like there is for the State Fair?

Roadguy wishes he could quote Dr. Seuss again, but Dr. Seuss didn’t write much about the laws of supply and demand, so instead I turned to Metro Transit’s Bob Gibbons.

Gibbons said his agency provides park-and-ride buses when the Twins have postseason play and the Dome is packed. But a regular-season game, with an ordinary attendance of, say, 20,000, simply wouldn’t generate enough rides, he said.

Southwest Transit used to provide special service to some Twins games, but that was cut this year for budgetary reasons. However, the agency’s website does have a page explaining how you can take its regularly scheduled buses to games during the week. You just have to hope that the night games don’t go into extra innings — the last buses out are at 9:20 and 10:15 p.m.

Of course, this is of little help to Elbert, who is unlikely to drive 33 miles from Andover to the southwest suburbs just to catch the bus.

THE GLBLWMR SPEAKS

The other day, Roadguy got an e-mail from the owner of the much-discussed GLBLWMR license plate. The guy, named Jeremey, confirmed that the letters do indeed mean “global warmer.” He even sent a photo of the plate surrounded, appropriately enough, by snow.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.