UC Irvine Institute of Transportation Studies

This paper is a case study of carpooling behavior on the 91 Express Lanes. The 91 Express Lanes are the nation's first implementation of High Occupancy/Toll (HOT) lanes where carpools with three or more passengers could use the lanes for free (at the time the data for this study was collected) and others pay a toll that varies by time of day to use the premium Express Lane. One concern over such a policy is that people won't carpool if they can just pay for the travel time savings that they would normally obtain by carpooling and using a High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane. Our survey data show that the rate of carpooling did not change much between the opening of the Express Lanes and now, there is a lot of changing between modes (increases and decreases in the number of passengers), there are a large number of people that carpool a few times a week, and that HOV-2s use both the regular lanes and the Express Lanes. We further investigate whether HOT lanes encourage carpooling by modeling carpool formation with discrete choice models. The results show that mode choice behavior in the corridor is similar to carpooling behavior in other locations and carpooling in the corridor is not discouraged.