High-occupancy vehicle lanes on the right: an alternative design for congestion reduction at freeway merge, diverge, and weaving areas

ABSTRACT

High-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes have been widely deployed in freeways with high demands and traffic congestion. This paper discusses how an alternative design with the HOV lane on the right side of the freeway could effectively mitigate congestion problems at freeway merge, diverge, and weaving areas as compared with the benchmark design of HOV lanes on the left. Simulation experiments show that the alternative design will result in a reduction in average delay by 5% to 10% and increase in throughput by 10% to 30% for all traffic. While the alternative design generally improves performance for the general purpose (GP) lanes, it will degrade HOV lane performance. Nonetheless, HOV lane vehicles enjoy a higher level of service than GP lane vehicles under the same background settings. The study suggests that it is practical to implement the alternative design on freeways, especially for areas with low HOV traffic volumes.

KEYWORDS:

• High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes
• congestion reduction
• traffic simulation
• freeway bottlenecks
• merge
• diverge and weaving

Acknowledgments

The authors want to thank a few other team members for their contributions to paper: Kate Ritchey and Alexandra Kondyli. The work presented in this paper remains the sole responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Transportation (Project Number: DTFH61-12-D-00030) and the University of Cincinnati Office of Research Collaborative Research Program.