Development of an HOV Application for North Texas Managed Lanes Projects (Drive on TEXpress)

The wide availability of electronic toll collection (ETC), and in particular the quick maturity of not so long ago considered state of the art technologies such as open road tolling (ORT), has boosted the deployment of managed lanes (ML) and high occupancy toll (HOT) facilities in the US. Together with pure high occupancy vehicle (HOV) facilities, they are all examples that have proven to be effective at reducing the levels of congestion in urban corridors. This paper presents the key design factors that were taken into account by the Developers of Managed Lanes in Dallas-Fort Worth region included in the TEXpress network when designing the HOV declaration system (Drive On TEXpress from now on Drive On), in order to ensure their success and to optimize the quality of service to the user. HOV users in these projects will be eligible for a toll discount if they self-declare as such. Our challenge was to find the more user-friendly, effective, and efficient self-declaration system. Alternative declaration methods such as lane-based declaration, electronic declaration, switchable transponder, and other options that were analysed will be reviewed. Results of several research projects conducted by states wishing to implement HOT or ML facilities have shown that current saturation enforcement techniques are not effective in reducing violation rates. However, given that no proven technologies seem to be currently available that completely removes the need for manual validation of occupancy previous to any citation, a combination of manual and automated enforcement seems to be the most efficient method to conduct enforcement. This paper will present and discuss the characteristics of the manual HOV enforcement conducted in the projects. Given the significant number of stakeholders involved in such a complex network, project coordination took a significant amount of the efforts of the project’s team. The document will also describe how the project was born and how the implemented solution was accepted by all parties. Finally, an analysis of the evolution of the usage during the first nine months of operation will be presented.