Last week Fred Barnes, Robert Poole, and I all wrote about how highways work and how government planning types often try to “improve” them. None of this, however, is new. A friend sends along Joan Didion’s wonderful 1976 essay “Bureaucrats,” concerning the imposition of car-pool (or High-Occupancy Vehicle, HOV) lanes on the Los Angeles freeway system. (You can find the essay in the evil Google Machine, but it’s collected in her book The White Album, which is full of fantastic stuff. If you don’t already have it, you’ll thank me.) As Didion reports, here’s what happened in 1976:

The California Department of Transportation—Caltrans—decided that it wanted to change the way people drive, in the name of the environment. Or something. So it introduced a pilot program on the Santa Monica Freeway: the “Diamond Lane.” The Diamond Lane was an HOV prototype, reserved for buses and cars with more than three riders. At the time of the Diamond Lane’s inception, the Santa Monica Freeway carried 240,000 cars per day, conveying a total of 260,000 people.