Economics of High Occupancy Committed Lanes

Martin Briand (), Nicolas Coulombel () and Guillaume Monchambert ()
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Martin Briand: LVMT - Laboratoire Ville, Mobilité, Transport - Université Gustave Eiffel - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Nicolas Coulombel: LVMT - Laboratoire Ville, Mobilité, Transport - Université Gustave Eiffel - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Guillaume Monchambert: Université de Lyon, UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2, LAET - Laboratoire Aménagement Économie Transports - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - ENTPE - École Nationale des Travaux Publics de l'État - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: This paper studies a new rule for allocating access to reserved road capacity, which we call a High Occupancy Committed Lane (HOCL). Unlike a conventional High Occupancy Vehicle Lane (HOVL), access does not require a driver to already carry passengers: drivers may enter the reserved lane alone provided that they commit to accepting compatible waiting passengers. We embed this mechanism in a bottleneck model with endogenous departure times, mode choice, heterogeneous passenger inconvenience, and policy-controlled fares. We show that, whenever an equilibrium exists, its modal allocation is unique even though passenger departure profiles need not be. Moreover, every feasible HOCL allocation can be decentralized. This allows the regulator to optimize directly over modal allocations, and recover implementing fares afterward. Compared with conventional HOVL operation, HOCL expands the set of implementable allocations and therefore lowers the minimum social cost. A quantitative illustration for a three-lane corridor shows that converting one lane is always socially desirable. Not accounting for the potential organization costs reduction allowed by HOCL, HOVL would perform just as well in the simulation. Our study encourages the implementation of HOCL, which we show to perform similarly or better than HOVL while being less prone to the empty-lane syndrome, and potentially reducing the organization burden of carpooling.

Keywords: High Occupancy Vehicle Lane; Carpooling; Bottleneck model; Congestion pricing; Working Papers du LAET (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-05840828

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