By the Year 2000, none of the proposed HOT-lane projects had come anywhere near adoption, most likely because both of the main forces for creating the Task Force had greatly receded by the late 1990's. If we had them at full scale, they could save the average household in the Basin hundreds of dollars a year in avoided costs from delay and lost health and productivity. HOT lanes on crowded corridors are the best start toward testing and achieving a universal, high-resolution system. Strong incentives produce strong impacts, whether in Singapore, on Eastern toll roads, or on California HOT lanes. Pricing always gets you there faster, and the public likes it.
Weak incentives are a political dead end.
They get no one there faster and would be seen, correctly, as nothing but another tax. If there is any hope of getting to full-scale smog and congestion pricing, it will be from baby steps that produce visible benefits, not baby steps that don't. The general public in Southern California is surprisingly willing to try road pricing. Nothing is either good or bad but alternatives make it so. The existing system is so colossally wasteful that almost any higher-resolution alternative would be an improvement.