[NTC2015-SU-R-09] Understanding Changes in Travel Behavior due to Managed Lanes

Road pricing has been advocated as an efficient travel demand management strategy to alleviate congestion. Recently, toll pricing has received great interest among policy makers and public agencies due to its potential to improve network efficiency and to generate revenues to pay for transportation improvements. Pricing schemes are also advocated as a strategy that potentially provides incentive to travelers with more flexible departure time to travel during off peak period, thereby shifting/spreading peak travel demand and improving travel time reliability. One promising approach in implementing road pricing is to convert existing under-utilized high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes to high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes.

• The main purpose of this research is to contribute to the literature on how to measure the effect of departure time and travel time reliability on travelers’ value of time and acceptability of HOT lanes.
• As a secondary purpose, we will also evaluate different survey schemes for data collection and we will implement advanced discrete choice models based on copulas to measure willingness to pay on HOT/HOV lanes.