Lead Presenter:  Jianyuan Xu | Graduate research assistant | University of Nevada, Reno

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Presentation Description

High-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes serve as a common type of managed lanes to relieve urban traffic congestion by encouraging carpooling on freeways to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Evaluating operational performance of HOV lanes plays a major role in proactively building resilient managed lane systems on freeways. In practice, the performance evaluation of HOV lanes highly relies on data collected from freeway detectors which are installed on fixed locations. However, the fixed detectors can only capture point-level data and fail to reflect the full story of vehicle operations on HOV lane segments, which creates a barrier for accurate freeway segment-level performance evaluation. Additionally, there exists a need to explore and utilize alternative data sources for performance evaluation when freeway detectors are not installed on freeways or malfunction. The emergence of connected vehicle trajectory data (CVTD) has great potential to provide innovative solutions for HOV lane segment performance evaluation by generating large-scale and high-resolution vehicle trajectories. Therefore, this research proposes an easy-to-use approach to facilitating the operational performance evaluation of basic HOV lane segments by integrating freeway detector data with CVTD. The proposed approach was implemented to evaluate two basic HOV segments in California based on two-week freeway detector data and vehicle trajectories in March, 2023 to validate its effectiveness. The findings from this research aim to assist practitioners in efficiently evaluating the operational performance of HOV lanes for further management and enhancement.

Speaker Biography

Jianyuan (William) Xu is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Civil & Environmental Engineering program at the University of Nevada Reno (UNR) and works as a graduate research assistant for Center for Advanced Transportation Education and Research (CATER) at UNR. He currently serves as the president of UNR Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) student chapter. His research areas mainly focus on traffic operation, traffic signal systems, freeway system analysis, and traffic safety. 

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