State-of-the-art assessment of toll rates for high-occupancy and toll lanes

Abstract

Pricing of the current high-occupancy and toll (HOT) lanes mostly relies on the lookup tables or equations that relate a toll with a given traffic condition measured by flow, density, and/or speed. Lack of theoretical support to construct the relationship has made pricing one of the most critical challenges to HOT implementation. Distinct from the existing practices, a toll scheme is proposed to reflect the value of HOT travel time savings and reliability. The HOT tolls determined by the monetary addition of both types of value are expressed as a toll curve with respect to the speed of general purpose (GP) lanes. The curve is found to be an exponential form, and the HOT tolls vary from $0.78 to $8.80 per use for a given ten-mile corridor under the unit value of time of $13/hr. Total value of reliability accounts for 40.3% to 45.8% of the tolls with the lowest percentage at the GP-lane speed of 45 mph.