Explaining high-occupancy-toll lane use

In recent years, high-occupancy-toll lanes have emerged as an increasingly popular alternative to high-occupancy-vehicle lanes for solving the problem s of traffic congestion and air pollution. However, the existing literature on the use of high-occupancy-toll lanes has attended much to their impacts to the neglect of their determinants. An understanding of why people choos e to use high-occupancy-toll lanes will shed light on policy decisions conc erning high-occupancy-toll lane investments and developments. To fill this void, this study examines the determinants of high-occupancy-toll lane use with the first comprehensive survey data on the State Route 91 Express Lane s in California and multivariate logistic regression models. The results sh ow that controlling for other variables, household income, vehicle occupanc y, commute trip, and age are important predictors of high-occupancy-toll la ne use, but gender, trip length, trip frequency, and other household charac teristics make no significant differences in high-occupancy-toll lane use. Moreover, contrary to the conventional wisdom, work-to-home trips are found to be more likely to use high-occupancy-toll lanes than home-to-work and o ther trips. These findings provide some useful indications for the implemen tation of high-occupancy-toll lanes and future research. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.