Carpool lane cheaters continue getting nailed like never before, with the number of tickets issued by the California Highway Patrol last year nearly doubling from 2010.

But traffic experts and motorists say it’s hardly making a dent in the problem. As many as 30 percent of cars in the diamond lanes are driven by solo drivers apparently willing to risk a $491 fine because they don’t fear being caught.

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Roadshow: New Highway 101 carpool lane looking more real Now Bay Area transportation officials are pushing a plan to earmark CHP patrols just for carpool enforcement during the hours when carpool rules are in effect. Earlier this month they sent an urgent directive to Sacramento to provide extra enforcement.

They are insisting it be included in an existing bill that would extend a popular carpool lane perk that allows drivers of electric and alternative-fuel vehicles to purchase green or white stickers and legally use the diamond lanes to skirt jammed traffic.

“Clean-air vehicles are hurting HOV lanes,” wrote Rebecca Long, the legislative analyst at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in San Francisco. “But cheaters are the real culprit.”

The sticker program will end Jan. 1, 2019. But legislation authored by Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica) would extend the program to 2025. Without that bill, all owners of the stickers would get booted out of carpool lanes in little more than a year.

But that bill says nothing about enforcement, and unless amendments are added, the MTC is expected to oppose AB 544.

Bloom was unaware of the MTC’s insistence on revising his bill, but said he takes “concerns and requests for amendments into consideration with all of my bills and this will be no exception.”

State Sen. Jim Beall of San Jose promises to give a revised bill a close look.

The bill is moving fast in Sacramento. It has cleared the state Assembly and has had its first reading in the Senate, with more hearings scheduled in mid-July.

The lane cheating strikes a lot of commuters as just plain wrong.

“I see a bunch of people who just go solo in the carpool lane and there are many electric plug-in cars without the stickers that go into that lane,” said Nelson Seto, who commutes from Milpitas to Mountain View on Highway 237. “The cheating is rampant.”

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The MTC’s proposed changes would require the CHP to dedicate officers to work solely on carpool cheating and double the cost of carpool decals from $22 to $44 to raise nearly $350,000 and help offset enforcement costs. Some would like specially marked cars on the freeway with something like “HOV Enforcement” as a message on the exterior.

Statewide, the CHP issued 64,000 tickets for carpool-lane cheating last year, up from 39,600 in 2010. No surprise, since the MTC found an average 24 percent violation rate in the afternoon commute. In some places it’s higher — more than 30 percent on the Bay Bridge and 30 percent on Highway 101 near Redwood City.

The stakes are high for those who drive energy-efficient cars.

The clean-air sticker policy is a big hit with them. The DMV has issued 240,911 stickers, up from just 69,554 at the end of 2013. As many as 8 percent of cars have stickers across California, while the figure zooms to 18 percent in Silicon Valley and 38 percent in the nine Bay Area counties.

“What we see with this bill is an opportunity,” the MTC’s Long said. “If the Legislature does want to extend this program, perhaps the state will consider more funding for enforcement.”

Two years ago, 58 percent of the Bay Area’s carpool lanes failed to achieve the minimum federal performance standard of 45 mph speeds at least 90 percent of the time. In Los Angeles, performance was even worse at 68 percent.

If that trend continues, something will need to be done to free up the carpool lanes, state officials said. It could mean ending the sticker program, allowing only vehicles carrying three or more people to qualify as a carpool, or writing more tickets to reduce the number of vehicles clogging the diamond lanes.

Caltrans must report back to federal officials by Dec. 1 on what options it might consider, otherwise the state could lose federal highway funds.

CHP officials had no comment on AB 544, saying it doesn’t offer opinions on proposed legislation.

But other officials endorsed the idea.

“From our perspective, frequent HOV lane enforcement is a critical factor for maintaining good HOV lane operation,” Caltrans traffic operations engineer Rod Oto said. “We support anything that helps the CHP with enforcement.”

John Goodwin of the MTC is in the same lane.

“Extra patrols are essential,” he said. “These patrols need not only to be on the highways every weekday for the duration of HOV lane hours, but they should be clearly marked as HOV enforcement vehicles to reinforce the message that CHP is taking occupancy enforcement seriously.”

For now, Karin Walters of Pleasanton fumes as she travels on Interstate 80 in the Berkeley area where there is a diamond lane for vehicles carrying three-plus persons: “The overwhelming majority of autos in that lane have only one person in the car — the driver,” she said. “Cheaters far outnumber honest drivers because they know there will be no consequences.”