DEFINING SPECIAL-USE LANES: CASE STUDIES AND GUIDELINES

Abstract

This research assesses the feasibility of high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) and high-occupancy vehicle/toll (HOT) facilities. In this report, current operational facilities are described and guidelines for the operation, design, agency involvement, and monitoring of freeway and arterial HOV lanes are provided. The operational effectiveness of selected configurations is assessed using a specially modified dynamic traffic assignment methodology in combination with a stochastic mode choice model. Computer simulation experiments were conducted using a corridor network from Fort Worth, Texas, as a test bed. The goal of the experiments was to examine the effect of five variables on the average trip time of a network with an HOV/HOT facility. These variables include lane usage and access point restrictions, vehicle eligibility, demand levels, price, and attractiveness of carpooling. The results of the study indicate that there is no one combination of lane usage and access points that consistently out-performs the others under different demand, price, and carpooling attractiveness scenarios. However, pricing, in combination with HOV facilities, provides greater flexibility in lane utilization under varying demand scenarios and, hence, is a potentially effective tool for managing congested network corridors.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.