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Around Boston, it's an expensive joke. North on I-93, it's either underutilized during rush hour or backed up just like the other lanes. The single carpool lane also consumes 2 lanes worth of width due to the barriers separating it from the other lanes. And if you do take the carpool lane when it could theoretically save some time, there's invariably some tool driving 20 below the limit, seemingly afraid of what they perceive as a narrow lane width (which it may or may not be) due to the barriers/islands to each side of the lane (the raised asphalt islands on the right of the lane are broken up every 6 feet or so by a ditch to make it difficult for anyone to drive over the island). I've seen these meat bags actually maneuver back and forth in the lane like NASCAR guys warming up their tires depending on whether they're passing the raised part of the island or the ditch.
South on I-93, they have a rig that moves a flexible concrete barrier that transfers the carpool lane to either the south-bound or north-bound side depending on the time of day. Get stuck behind a collision or a breakdown in that lane and forget about any time savings. Then there's the cost of all that equipment. Granted the mobile state tax collectors can nail people with a ticket once in a while for driving in the carpool lane without any passengers, but there's no way it makes up for the system cost.
Everything else is tolls, the overhead of which eats over $.40/toll paid (doesn't help that the outdoor cashiers make $60-70k/yr.). That, of course, doesn't take into account the cost of the bottlenecks and wasted gas of people forced to use such an idiotic, archaic system or jamming up residential streets trying to avoid it.
But this state is run by the hopelessly stupid and corrupt, so I don't know if other places are the same. Politicians are politicians, so I suspect they are, but few places have as much traffic as here.
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