Volvo Center

In this paper, the authors report on research that shows that high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes do not reduce the capacity of general purpose (GP) lanes. Empirical evidence, complemented with simulations, enable the authors to describe how to estimate total bottneleck capacity and how deploy HOV lanes without hindering vehicle flow. The authors also offer a dynamic strategy that increases a bottleneck's total discharge rate.

Chinese cities have a long legacy of bicycle use due to relatively low incomes, dense urban development, and short trip lengths. Because of tremendous economic growth resulting in increased motorization and spatial expansion of cities, trips are becoming longer and more difficult to make by bicycle. As a result, electric powered twowheelers have risen in popularity over the past five years. Touted as environmentally friendly vehicles, they are capable of traveling 450 kilometers on a single charge and emit zero tailpipe emissions. However, many cities are banning electric twowheelers from...

Freeways and other high-performance roadway investments have long been considered vital to the economic well-being of metropolitan areas. Empirical research shows that limited-access, grade-separated freeway systems increase a region’s economic productivity by lowering transportation costs, a factor input to economic production (Aschauer, 1990; Boarnet, 1997). Past studies also reveal that urban land markets capitalize the benefit of proximity to freeway interchanges, especially for non-residential uses and in areas experiencing worsening traffic conditions (Gillen, 1996; Boarnet, 1997;...

For networks consisting of a single route the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) can be predicted analytically; but when the networks consist of multiple overlapping routes the flows observed in congestion for a given density are less than those one would predict if the routes were homogeneously congested and did not overlap. These types of networks also tend to jam at densities that are only a fraction of their routes’ average jam density. This paper provides an explanation for this phenomena. It shows that, even for perfectly homogeneous networks with spatially uniform travel patterns...