Deterministic Approach to Managed Lane Analysis on Freeways in Context of Highway Capacity Manual

The building of managed lanes parallel to general purpose lanes is an increasingly common approach to optimizing freeway capacity. Managed lanes allow agencies to classify customers and assign a portion of the freeway capacity to them. With no methodology in the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) for analyzing these facilities, analysts rely on more time-consuming simulation analyses. A methodology is presented for estimating the performance of a parallel system of general purpose and managed lane facilities in an HCM context based on NCHRP Project 3–96. The methodology defines new managed lane segment types to use in an HCM analytical framework and is associated with a new set of speed–flow curves. It is sensitive to the number of lanes and the type of separation between managed lanes and general purpose lanes. The method introduces the concept of parallel lane groups of general purpose and managed lanes and thus can account for speed reduction in managed lanes caused by congestion in adjacent general purpose lanes. The method was implemented in a computational engine, FREEVAL-ML, which was built on the freeway facilities method in HCM 2010 but which was updated to incorporate inputs and outputs of the managed lane components. The geometry of two existing managed lane facilities in Washington State is used to illustrate the method, demonstrating the applicability of the analytical framework to real-world facilities.