A Highway Toll Lane Framework that Unites Autonomous Vehicles and High-occupancy Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper proposes a toll lane system that reserves a lane for autonomous high-occupancy vehicles to improve traffic flow, analyzing equilibrium behaviors and optimal policies to enhance social mobility.

Contribution

It introduces the first systematic framework uniting autonomous and high-occupancy vehicles through toll lane design and analyzes resulting lane choice equilibria.

Findings

Autonomous high-occupancy vehicles significantly increase traffic throughput.

Optimal tolls can effectively manage lane choices and improve mobility.

The framework offers policy insights for integrating autonomous and high-occupancy vehicles.

Abstract

We consider the scenario where human-driven/autonomous vehicles with low/high occupancy are sharing a segment of highway and autonomous vehicles are capable of increasing the traffic throughput by preserving a shorter headway than human-driven vehicles. We propose a toll lane framework where a lane on the highway is reserved freely for autonomous vehicles with high occupancy, which have the greatest capability to increase social mobility, and the other three classes of vehicles can choose to use the toll lane with a toll or use the other regular lanes freely. All vehicles are assumed to be only interested in minimizing their own travel costs. We explore the resulting lane choice equilibria under the framework and establish desirable properties of the equilibria, which implicitly compare high-occupancy vehicles with autonomous vehicles in terms of their capabilities to increase social mobility. We further use numerical examples in the optimal toll design, the occupancy threshold design, and the policy design problems to clarify the various potential applications of this toll lane framework that unites high-occupancy vehicles and autonomous vehicles. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that systematically studies a toll lane framework that unites autonomous vehicles and high-occupancy vehicles on the roads.