Effects of HOV lanes on freeway bottlenecks

The Smoothing Effect of Carpool Lanes on Freeway Bottlenecks

Real data show that reserving a lane for carpools on congested freeways induces a smoothing effect that is characterized by significantly higher bottleneck discharge flows (capacities) in adjacent lanes. The effect arises because disruptive vehicle lane changing diminishes in the presence of a carpool lane. The effect is reproducible across days and freeway sites: it was observed, without excep...

Evaluating Air Quality Benefits of Freeway High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) Lanes in Southern California

In the past decade, a variety of questions have been raised concerning the effectiveness of high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes. In Southern California, HOV lanes evaluation studies have recently been conducted, justifying the effectiveness of HOV lanes in several ways. However, very little research has been performed in evaluating the air quality benefits of HOV lanes. In this paper, a study is...

Impacts of Increasing Vehicle - Occupancy Requirements on HOV / HOT Lanes

at http://trid.trb.org/view/2009/C/881189 From the abstract: This paper describes an empirical research investigation of SOV behavior in the I-394 HOT facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, known as MnPASS. Using traffic and tolling data from March 2008, the research team conducted a visual time series analysis, price elasticity analysis, and developed a utility-based mode choice model for SOV beh...

Sensing for HOV/HOT Lanes Enforcement

Systematic Identification of Freeway Bottlenecks

We present an algorithm that identifies bottleneck locations, the times for which each bottleneck is active and the delay it causes. The bottlenecks are ranked in terms of their frequency of recurrence and the magnitude of their delay impact. The algorithm works with five-minute loop detector data. It uses speed difference as an indicator of bottleneck activation. The algorithm is applied to th...