Different Types of High-Occupancy Vehicle Access Control Comparative Analysis of Empirical Capacities

High-occupancy vehicle (HOV) facilities have been widely implemented in the United States as a way to improve mobility, trip time reliability, and air quality of freeway systems. In California there are two types of HOV facilities, namely, limited access and continuous access with part-time or full-time operation. This paper presents a framework for comparing the mobility performance of the types of HOV facilities on the basis of regression analyses using a California data set as a case study. Parametric regression models were developed to explain empirical freeway capacity as a function of a set of explanatory variables including the type of HOV access. Modeling results consistently indicated that freeway segments with limited-access HOV lanes would have had higher overall capacities than those of continuous-access HOV facilities, everything else being equal. In addition, the proposed framework can be applied well to the analyses on other types of managed lanes.