Making HOT lanes benefit every traveler? Design, pricing, and analysis

HOT lanes are HOV lanes that permit solo-drivers to use them with a charge. Such facilities can promote carpool use while not wasting lane capacity if the lane is underutilized by carpoolers, and provide a revenue stream to the HOT lane operators. Most of the HOT lane facilities are single-lane facilities that either has too little spare capacity for solo-drivers, or plagued by moving bottlenecks created by slower drivers or the friction between fast moving HOT lanes traffic and slow moving regular lanes traffic. In this research, we propose a new design of HOT lanes that 1) comprises a minimum of two lanes, 2) is priced to maintain capacity flow, and 3) benefits both carpoolers and regular lane travelers. We will select a section of a freeway with existing carpool lanes, convert the carpool lane to HOT lanes with the new design, and compare the performance of the two systems under existing demand conditions and reasonable assumptions of drivers' value of time, carpooling pairing cost, and traffic's tendency to equilibrate over generalized travel cost. This collaborative proposal combines the expertise of domain researchers in transportation science and engineering and leading researchers in mathematical optimization from the two institutions: University of California at Davis and University of Southern California. Their joint effort strengthens the collaboration between these two institutions with the common goal of addressing an important change of events in today's mobility systems that has significant impacts to the well-being of urban transportation.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $100,000.00
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3551747109

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Department of Transportation

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  METRANS Transportation Center

  University of Southern California
  Los Angeles, CA  United States  90089-0626
• Project Managers:

  Brinkerhoff, Cort

• Performing Organizations:

  University of Southern California, Los Angeles

  University Park Campus
  Los Angeles, CA  United States  90089
• Principal Investigators:

  Dessouky, Maged

• Start Date: 20200816
• Expected Completion Date: 20210815
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers
• Source Data: https://metrans.org/research/making-hot-lanes-benefit-every-traveler-design-pricing-and-analysis

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Carpools; High occupancy toll lanes; High occupancy vehicle lanes; Travel; Travel costs
• Subject Areas: Economics; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation; Research;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01745063
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: METRANS Transportation Center
• Contract Numbers: 69A3551747109
• Files: RIP
• Created Date: Jul 14 2020 6:08PM