Solo EV drivers using California carpool lanes will face ticketing beginning Monday as the perk disappears.

Though the benefit technically ended for solo drivers a few months ago, the Department of Motor Vehicles offered a 60-day grace period that ended Monday. Now, solo drivers face fines of up to $490.

With this, most carpool lanes require vehicles with more than two people.

Here is what to know:

How many people are affected?

As of Aug. 14, more than half a million motorists statewide had an active decal on their vehicle to access carpool lanes. California has an estimated 1,171 carpool lane-miles, with 803 miles in Southern California and 366 miles in Northern California, according to a UC Berkeley study.

With more than 35 million total registered vehicles in California, that means 1% to 2% of the vehicle fleet will lose access to the carpool lane, said Antonio Bento, professor of public policy and economics at USC.

What’s the background?

Federal legislation has allowed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to grant solo drivers in low-emission and energy-efficient cars to use the carpool, or High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV), lane.

The goal was to promote the adoption of alternative-fuel vehicles and assist in meeting environmental goals that included reducing fuel consumption and pollution caused by congested freeways, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Over time, states developed incentive programs, choosing which car models to give carpool access to.

California is one of 13 states that offered this type of incentive program to its residents. Qualified drivers in the Golden State include those who drive fuel cell electric, natural gas or plug-in electric cars.

Why is the perk ending?

In 2015, Congress authorized California’s program through a highway funding bill, but that authorization expired Sept. 30.

In an effort to extend the decal program, state Assemblymember Greg Wallis (R-Bermuda Dunes) wrote Assembly Bill 2678, which would push the end date to Jan. 1, 2027.

The bill was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year.

But the change never got the required federal approval so the extension was moot.

Police have vowed to “hunt down” the “animals” behind a mass shooting at a children’s birthday party in California.

Three children and a 21-year-old died in Saturday’s shooting at a banquet hall, with 11 more injured.

“We all know that there are people out there [who] are violent and commit violent crimes,” said Patrick Withrow, sheriff of San Joaquin County.

“But these animals walked in and shot children at a children’s birthday party.”

Officers were called to the banquet hall in Stockton just before 6pm local time (2am UK time).

Around 100-150 people had gathered to celebrate a child’s birthday.

The sheriff told reporters he had been at a Thanksgiving celebration in Oregon during the incident but “put down my grandbabies to come hunt down these animals who took somebody else’s babies away from them”.

He appealed for the public to send in “any little bit” of information that could lead to the arrest of the gunmen.

“If you know anything about this, you have to come forward and tell us what you know.”

There is currently nobody in custody over the incident.

Although the investigation is still under way, Sheriff Withrow said there appeared to have been “multiple shooters” who began the attack indoors and then moved outside.

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The shooting was “not a random act”, he said. “They walked into this area and were probably looking for somebody in particular.”

He confirmed that guns had been found on the roof of a nearby building but it was too early to say whether they were “related to this crime”.

Police have also towed multiple cars in the area, some damaged with bullet holes, in case they can be used as evidence.

“Please continue to give us more information,” he said, “and we will follow every single lead.”

A vigil was held for the victims on Sunday, according to local media, with the entire local council in attendance.

On Saturday, Stockton mayor Christina Fugazi said that “families should be together instead of at the hospital, standing next to their loved one, praying that they survive”.

California governor Gavin Newsom’s office added that he had been briefed on the “horrific shooting”.

Amid the fusillade of terrible headlines this year, one pierced my nerdy heart.

“Enjoying this headline? You’re a rarity: Reading for pleasure is declining …” was the topper to a story by my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts in August. Pleasure reading among American adults fell more than 40% in two decades — a continuation of a trend going back to the 1940s.

I get it. We don’t want to read for fun when we’re trying to wade through the sewer of information we find online and make sense of our terrible political times. But as Tyrion Lannister, the wily hero of George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” series, said, “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”

So for my annual holiday columna recommending great books about Southern California, I’m sticking to formats that lend themselves to easier reading — bite-size jewels of intellect, if you will. Through essays, short stories, poems and pictures, each of my suggestions will bring solace through the beauty of where we live and offer inspiration about how to double down on resisting the bad guys.

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s warm voice has informed Angelenos about arts, politics and education for 25 years on what was long called KPCC and now goes by LAist 89.3. What most listeners might not know is that the Mexico City native first earned acclaim as a founder of Taco Shop Poets, an influential San Diego collective that highlighted Chicano writers in a city that didn’t seem to care for them.

Guzman-Lopez lets others delve into that history in the intro and forerward to “California Southern: Writings from the Road, 1992-2025.” Reading the short anthology, it quickly becomes clear why his audio dispatches have always had a prose-like quality often lacking among public radio reporters, whose delivery tends to be as dry as Death Valley.

In mostly English but sometimes Spanish and Spanglish, Guzman-Lopez takes readers from the U.S.-Mexico border to L.A., employing the type of lyrical bank shots only a poet can get away with. I especially loved his description of Silver Lake as “two tax brackets away/From Salvatrucha Echo Park.” Another highlight is contained in “Trucks,” where Guzman-Lopez praises the immigrant entrepreneurs from around the world who come to L.A. and name their businesses after their hometowns.

“Say these names to praise the soil,” he writes. “Say these names to document the passage. Say these names to remember the trek.”

Guzman-Lopez has been doing readings recently with Lisa Alvarez, who published her first book, “Some Final Beauty and Other Stories,” after decades of teaching English — including to my wife back in the 1990s! — at Irvine Valley College.

The L.A. native did the impossible for someone who rarely delves into made-up stories because the real world is fantastical enough: She made me not just read fiction but enjoy it.

Alvarez’s debut is a loosely tied collection centered on progressive activists in Southern California, spanning a seismic sendoff for someone who fought during the Spanish Civil War and a resident of O.C.’s canyon country tipping off the FBI about her neighbor’s participation in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.

Author, activist and Irvine Valley College professor Lisa Alvarez holds a copy of her short story collection “Some Final Beauty and Other Stories.”

(Don Leach / Daily Pilot)

Most of the protagonists are women, brought to life through Alvarez’s taut, shining sentences. Memories play a key role — people loved and lost, places missed and reviled. A nephew remembers how his uncle landed in an FBI subversives file after attending a Paul Robeson speech in South L.A. shortly after serving in the Navy in World War II. An L.A. mayor who seems like a stand-in for Antonio Villaraigoisa considers himself “the crafty and cool voice of one who sees his past and future in terms of chapters in a best-selling book” as he tries to convince a faded movie star to come down from a tree during a protest.

To paraphrase William Faulkner about the South, the past is never dead in Southern California — it isn’t even past.

While Alvarez is a first-time author, D.J. Waldie has written many books. The Livy of Lakewood, who has penned important essays about L.A. history and geography for decades, has gathered some of his recent efforts in “Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, Fire.”

A lot of his subjects — L.A.’s mother tree, pioneering preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, the first Hass avocado — are tried-and-true terrain for Southern California writers. But few of us can turn a phrase like Waldie. On legendary Dodger broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaime Jarrín, he writes, “The twin cities of Los Angeles and Los Ángeles, evoked by [their] voices … may seem to be incommensurate places to the unhearing, but the borders of the two cities are porous. Sound travels.”

Man, I wish I would have written that.

“Elements of Los Angeles” is worth the purchase, if only to read “Taken by the Flood,” Waldie’s account of the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster that killed at least 431 people — mostly Latinos — and destroyed the career of L.A.’s water godfather, William Mulholland. The author’s slow burn of the tragic chronology, from Mulholland’s famous “There it is. Take it” quote when he unleashed water from the Owens Valley in 1913 to slake the city’s thirst, to how L.A. quickly forgot the disaster, compounds hubris upon hubris.

But then, Waldie concludes by citing a Spanish-language corrido about the disaster: “Friends, I leave you/with this sad song/and with a plea to heaven/For those taken by the flood.”

The ultimate victims, Waldie argues, are not the dead from the St. Francis Dam but all Angelenos for buying into the fatal folly of Mullholland’s L.A.

“Elements of Los Angeles” was published by Angel City Press, a wing of the Los Angeles Public Library that also released “Cruising J-Town: Japanese American Car Culture in Los Angeles.”

Cal State Long Beach sociology professor Oliver Wang offers a powerhouse of a coffee table book by taking what could have easily sold as a scrapbook of cool images and grounding it in the history of a community that has seen the promise and pain of Southern California like few others.

We see Japanese Americans posing in front of souped-up imports, reveling in SoCal’s kustom kulture scene of the 1960s, standing in front of a car at a World War II-era incarceration camp and loading up their gardening trucks at a time when they dominated the landscaping industry.

“One can read entire histories of American car culture and find no mention of Japanese or Asian American involvement,” Wang writes — but that’s about as pedantic as “Cruising J-Town” gets.

The rest is a delight that zooms by like the rest of my recs. Drop the doomscrolling for a day, make the time to read them all and become a better Southern Californian in the process. Enjoy!