High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes have been proposed as one of the most applicable and cost-effective countermeasures against freeway congestion. By allowing Single Occupancy Vehicles (SOVs) to use High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes with a toll, excess capacities of HOV lanes can be utilized. Through balancing the pricing and vehicle occupancy constraints, an HOT lane system can optimize traffic allocations between HOT and General Purpose (GP) lanes and hence enhance the overall infrastructure efficiency. Since the HOT lane concept was initiated in 1993, HOT lane has been a hot discussion topic. HOT lane operations involve technical, political, environmental, and equity considerations and hence have fairly broad societal impacts.
Over the past 15 years, nine HOT lane facilities have been developed and put in use. With the field data collected from these HOT lane facilities, many important issues can be analyzed for better understanding the system. The NCHRP 03-96, Analysis of Managed Lanes on Freeway Facilities, research team collected a significant amount of field data from the identified HOT lane facilities in Florida, Washington, Minnesota, and California over the past two years. Based on these field data, several important issues, such as HOT lane capacity, impacts on HOV drivers, HOT lane users’ value of time, and optimal tolling strategies, were investigated by Dr. Wang and his NCHRP 03-96 research team. Major findings of their study will be reported in this talk.
Dr. Yinhai Wang is an Associate Professor in transportation engineering at the University of Washington (UW). He received his Ph.D. in transportation engineering from the University of Tokyo (1998), a master's degree in computer science and engineering from the UW, and another master's degree in construction management and a bachelor degree in civil engineering from Tsinghua University, China. Dr. Wang is the founder and the director of the Smart Transportation Applications and Research Laboratory (STAR Lab) at the UW. The STAR Lab served as the remote training center for Washington State Department of Transportation.
Dr. Wang has conducted extensive research in traffic detection systems, transportation data management and analysis, traffic operations, managed lanes, advanced traffic control systems, traffic simulation, and traffic accident modeling, He has published forty-two peer-reviewed journal articles, two edited books, one book chapter, and 30 peer-reviewed conference papers. To disseminate research findings, he has delivered 57 invited talks and 102 presentations or posters at national or international conferences, research institutes, and workshops. He serves as the president of Chinese Overseas Transportation Association (COTA) and members of both the Freeway Operations Committee and Transportation Information Systems and Technology Committee at the Transportation Research Board (TRB). He is also the winner of the ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering Best Paper Award for 2003. Dr. Wang is currently an associate editor for the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering and the Thomas & Marilyn Nielsen Endowed Professor at the UW.