Empirical Study of Lane-Changing Behavior along Different Types of High-Occupancy Vehicle Facilities in California

Abstract

Lane changing is one important aspect of vehicle maneuvers that has significant impacts on freeway operation. Most of the previous research on lane changing has focused on the microscopic modeling of lane change movements. Very few studies have investigated lane-changing behavior along high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) facilities, especially in the context of comparing different access types. This paper describes work that extracted lane change data with high resolution in both time and space from videos and investigated lane-changing behavior on freeways with different types of HOV access configurations. Furthermore, the extracted lane change data were correlated with lane-by-lane flow and occupancy data from the California Freeway Performance Measurement System. Compared with continuous-access HOV facilities, limited-access HOV facilities were found to have a higher number of lane changes per unit distance and a shorter time gap when the subject vehicle moved out of the HOV lane. Also, most of the lane changes on limited-access HOV facilities occurred within the first half of ingress–egress areas. The insights provided by these results on lane-changing maneuvers along HOV facilities can be used to support traffic operation analyses, calibrate driver behavioral logic in traffic simulation models, and inform the design of lane configurations and access control measures for managed lanes.