Acquiring Travel Time and Network Level Origin - Destination

This paper assesses technologies that may be applicable for improving the effectiveness of high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane enforcement, and describes a test application that is being conducted on the East R.L. Thornton Freeway (I-30) Contraflow HOV Lane in Dallas, Texas. The Texas Transportation Institute has identified and investigated several technologies that potentially could improve the safety and cost-effectiveness of enforcing HOV facilities. Several technologies, including video, automatic vehicle identification and machine vision, were subjectively evaluated on their ability to automatically determine vehicle occupancy. Based upon these subjective evaluations, researchers decided to further investigate the use of video in HOV lane enforcement. A demonstration test and subsequent video analyses determined that current pattern recognition algorithms would not be sufficient to automatically determine vehicle occupancy. Results of the demonstration test did reveal that high-quality video used in conjunction with automatic license plate readers could be very useful in making the HOV enforcement process semi-automatic. A video-based review and enforcement system is currently in process with a one-year operational test on the East R.L. Thornton Freeway HOV Lane. The results of the operational test will be used in determining whether video technology may be applied to existing HOV lanes in urban areas or other future HOV lanes in Dallas.