Assessing the impact of ride-sourcing vehicles on HOV-lane efficacy and management strategies

High-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, which exclusively allow vehicles with two or more travelers on board to enter, has been recognized as a promising and practical way to motivate travelers to carpool. However, in the presence of ride-sourcing services, ride-sourcing vehicles with one driver and one (or more) passenger on board also meet the vehicle requirements of HOV lanes. So instead of encouraging travelers to carpool, HOV lanes may benefit ride-sourcing users and stimulate ride-sourcing demand. In this paper, in a single-corridor network with both HOV lanes and general purpose (GP) lanes, we model travelers’ mode choices among transit, driving alone, ride-sourcing, and carpool, and delineate travelers’ lane choices at user equilibrium, with the travel time of GP/HOV lanes and the carpool price being endogenously determined. With numerical examples, we show that the occupation of HOV lanes by ride-sourcing vehicles will greatly reduce the time saving on HOV lanes, thus lower the attractiveness of carpool, and increase the total travel time cost on the corridor. To solve this problem, we propose to implement an additional tolling scheme on HOV lanes, so that carpool users can split the toll evenly, while ride-sourcing riders have to pay the toll alone. As shown by numerical examples, the optimal tolling scheme can effectively reduce the occupancy of ride-sourcing vehicles on the HOV lane and encourage users to carpool. And the impacts of the ride-sourcing price, driving car cost and the HOV lane capacity ratio on the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid toll and HOV strategies are examined through sensitivity analysis.