TRAFFIC WOES ARE EVERYONE'S WOES ALLOWING HIGH-PRICED HYBRIDS INTO CAR-POOL LANES IS NO ANSWER.

Byline: Joseph Honig Local View

CALIFORNIA'S freeways, marvels of imagination, ingenuity and sweat, are, on their best days, shining examples of egalitarian transport.

Pricey, imported autos - some carrying movie stars, others ferrying plutocrats - cruise alongside the least of us. We are, each of us and all of us, citizens in transit. There are no velvet ropes at entrance ramps.

Unless, of course, you happen to be lucky enough to have a friend, neighbor or colleague who, in that high-odds lottery of life, can join you on arduous commutes. You've now arrived. You've got the winning ticket in our rush-hour sweepstakes.

You're in the car-pool lanes, those often lonely, deserted stretches of pavement reserved for drivers with passengers. A minimum of two can play, but this is the drive of your life. Time saved, not served, in that bumper-to-bumper river of steel.

So long ago, transport mavens decided carpooling was the future. Save gas, they said. Save the air. Save precious hours for considerate, earth- friendly commuters. Whether such favoritism offered equal treatment, equal protection to traffic-maddened drivers, was a nonstarter of a question. Environmentalism won the day. It wasn't much of a contest.

Still, at all hours, our car-pool lanes, are sometimes woefully empty. How to fill them? How to make them work harder? Or simply justify their existences when millions of solitary road warriors jam our highways?

Fill them with hybrids, Sacramento's green lobby crows. Allow high-mileage gasoline-and-electric-powered cars to cruise car-pool lanes with just a solitary soul inside their cabins, a legislative proposal urges. For this will, ultimately, inspire the rest of us to eschew gas burners. This will, in time, conserve energy, clean our air and force auto companies to build ultra-efficient vehicles.

Nice thoughts. Nice sentiments. Nicer, still, if they didn't amount to a ``let them eat hybrids'' slap at striving, struggling Californians for whom new cars are dreams forever deferred.

For there is something terribly regressive about rewarding those with the resources to purchase spanking new hybrids, cars that cost thousands more than standard-issue models. Making fortunate lives even easier. Selectively increasing time with children and families for some of us with means.

Never mind that there are hybrids - and there are hybrids. Ford is said to have asked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto a hybrid car-pool lane bill when it gets to his desk; the measure would bestow special privileges only to hybrids (sans passengers) getting minimums of 45 miles to the gallon. (The Ford hybrids don't qualify. Some Japanese imports do.)

The governor, who drives behemoth Hummers and roaring motorcycles, would do well to send the hybrid legislation back where it came from - back to the desks of well-meaning lawmakers and activists barely familiar with the lives of our hardest working Californians: the maids, the gardeners, the laborers and dishwashers for whom new cars, let alone hybrids, are faraway dreams. Not to mention millions of middle-class families in hock to finance companies and repair shops as they fight to keep high-mileage clunkers alive.

This while the white-wine-and-brie crowd trades German and Scandinavian engineering for the quiet hum of electric horsepower. This while Hollywood tree-huggers buy snappy Asian hybrids with platinum credit cards.

What's the beer-and-peanuts crowd supposed to do? Applaud? Cheer as lucky fellow citizens pass by? Stop saving for educations or home repairs and scamper off to the nearest Toyota showroom?

This is callous automotive hauteur at its very worst, class warfare practiced by the very people who would protect our nation from oil-rich sheikdoms where, incidentally, democracy is an obscure, undesirable idea.

Maybe the governor will listen to Ford. Maybe he will think of the working poor who make our state habitable. One hopes so.

Then again, California's strongman has flashing lights, sirens and state police to make sure he's never stuck in traffic.

The car-pool lanes belong to him.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is never alone in an aging, recalcitrant, battered car that is the best he can afford.