Land Use and Built Environment

This is the most extensive empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of California’s HOV system based on data collected from traffic sensors. The evaluation leads to four major conclusions. (1) Since it operates as a single lane freeway, an HOV lane suffers a 20 % capacity loss compared with multi-lane freeways. (2) HOV lanes are either under-utilized or suffer degraded operations. (3) HOV lanes do not measurably increase car-pooling. (4) HOV lanes do not reduce overall congestion in a reasonably well-managed system.

District 10 of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) encompasses an area of seasonal fog and dust-related visibility problems that have been the cause of numerous multi-car traffic collisions, many fatal. In 1990, motivated by the expansion of State Route 120 (SR 120) connecting Interstate Highway 5 (I-5) and State Route 99 (SR 99), Caltrans proposed a sophisticated multi-sensor automated warning system as a means for reducing incidents in this high-traffic area. This proposal, and the significant development effort that followed, culminated in the implementation of Phase...

This report presents the findings of its investigation of institutional aspects of bus rapid transit (BRT) through both a macroscopic examination, a survey of members of the U.S. Bus Rapid Transit Consortium and several Canadian transit properties, and a more focused site-specific examination of three California BRT systems. The macroscopic examination resulted from a literature review, project team brainstorming meetings, and input from the Federal Transit Administration. Several dozen issues were identified and were grouped into nine categories that formed the basis of the survey:...

BTS can be used to evaluate a variety of changes in highway design to improve bottlenecks, such as: (1) addition of highway lanes, (2) addition of automated or HOV lanes, or (3) incident management strategies to reduce the frequency, duration and magnitude of incidents. BTS can also be used to project future highway conditions as baselevel traffic grows or driver behavior changes.The new version of BTS was enhanced to include incident dependencies, variable weather conditions, reneging, and randomly varying traffic volumes. As of yet, BTS is not capable of analyzing highway performance on...