When should carpool lanes be introduced in a multi-lane highway?
✍ Scribed by Hai Yang
- Publisher
- Institute for Transportation Inc.
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 435 KB
- Volume
- 32
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0197-6729
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
High-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes are oRen suggested as a costeffective alternative to address growing traffic congestion problems by providing priority treatment for buses and carpools. As a consequence of introduction of HOV lanes, some auto drivers would switch to buses and carpools, thereby reducing total vehicle demand, whereas there would be fewer lanes available for the remaining vehicles, thus possibly increasing the time cost of solo drivers. It is therefore an important issue to evaluate the efficiency of HOV lanes based on some system-wide costeffectiveness measures. This short note presents a simple demand-supply equilibrium model to evaluate the benefit resulting from HOV lanes, and therefore determine whether and how many HOV lanes should be introduced in a multilane highway.