Abstract
This study proposes two general alternative designs to enhance the operation and safety of High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes at junctions with bus terminals or parking lots. A series of analysis tools, including microscopic simulation, video-based vehicle tracking technique, and Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM), are applied to model and test the safety and operational efficiency of an HOV road segment near a bus terminal in Québec as a case study. A metaheuristic optimization algorithm (i.e., Whale Optimization Algorithm) is employed to calibrate the microscopic model while deviation from the observed headway distribution is considered as a cost function. The results indicate that this type of HOV configurations exhibits significant safety problems (high number of crossing conflicts) and operational issues (high value of total delay) due to the terminal-bound buses that frequently need to travel across the main road. It is shown that the proposed alternative geometry design efficiently ameliorates the traffic conflicts issues. In addition, the alternative control design scheme significantly reduces the public transit delay. It is expected that this methodology can be applied to other reserved lane configurations similar to the investigated case study.
Highlights
The High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane represents a restricted usage traffic lane reserved for vehicles carrying a predetermined number of occupants
The orientations of these two cameras were adjusted to capture east-west traffic that interacts with both access points into and out of the bus terminal
This study proposed two general alternative geometry and control designs to improve the operation and safety of High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes near the bus terminals and parking lots
Summary
The HOV lane represents a restricted usage traffic lane reserved for vehicles carrying a predetermined number of occupants. Many problems related to various implementations of HOV lanes have been identified These problems can be roughly classified into two categories, the reduction of capacity (for the non-HOV users) and potential traffic safety issues, respectively. The former category may include increased congestion on the adjacent General Purpose (GP) lanes and/or reduction of vehicle speeds due to the merging maneuvers of High Occupancy Vehicles into the GP lanes. The latter category is mainly related to the lane changes at prohibited locations, especially in the proximity of junctions with other road facilities, such as bus terminals or parking lots [3]
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