HIGH OCCUPANCY VEHICLE (HOV) BEST PRACTICES

The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) has an ambitious regional-scale plan for implementing High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes on freeways in the Toronto area. This has evolved over the past decade to the point where detailed design is proceeding for parts of the network. The ministry has adopted a cautious approach to HOV and has thoroughly investigated the issues and implications before committing to implementing HOV facilities. A recent part of this effort was a Best Practices study which addressed several unresolved issues from earlier work in developing operational planning and design guidelines. The concurrent application of the study findings to an HOV detail design project allowed them to be tested against a real-life situation. The study focused on concurrent-flow buffer-separated left side freeway HOV lanes - the basic layout proposed for the majority of the Toronto-area HOV system. The new Best Practices supplement (and in some cases replace) the HOV standards defined in the MTO's Geometric Design Manual. Among the three dozen areas of HOV practice where the study developed/evolved new guidelines for Ontario, those of greatest interest to the international community include specific items in the Enforcement, Geometric Design, Signage, and Implementation groups. These advances in the State of the Art are described in this paper.