Abstract
Managed lanes, specifically for high occupancy vehicle (HOV) and high occupancy and toll (HOT) lanes, face such undiscovered issues as their performance regarding speed dispersion, equilibrium relationships with general purpose (GP) lanes in terms of speed and level of service, and joint effects of managed lane policies like eligibility, access control, and pricing. The goal of this dissertation is to provide theoretical and practical procedures of managed lane operation assessment under four modules. The first module correlates speed dispersion with the fundamental traffic flow parameters. It reveals that coefficients of variation of speed for HOV and GP lanes are exponential with occupancy, negative exponential with space mean speed, and two-phase linear to flow. The second module proposes two speed equilibrium schemes for HOV and GP lanes. The schemes present distinct speed pairs by congestion level, but speed of HOV lanes is identically ensured no less than GP lanes. The second module also develops an HOT scheme that adopts value of time and value of reliability to formulate HOT tolls with respect to speed of GP lanes. The third module identifies lane management and congestion hot spots by contrasting the level of service of managed lanes and GP lanes in deterministic and stochastic ways. The case study indicates that lane management hot spots are spatially and temporally dynamic, and a non-hot spot less likely turns to congestion without being a lane management hot spot as transition, or vise versa. The last module develops two macroscopic approaches to screening the policy combination set of managed lanes. The optimal/non-inferior policies for non-eliminated combinations are verified by multi-objective binary integer linear programming.