I'd be interested to see how well it works over the medium term, with typical levels of enforcement. I am skeptical. I see people weaving in and out of HOV lanes all the time on the highway.
I do have to wonder about how much of the nonsense in the HOV lanes comes from some combination of two lane express lanes getting blocked by trucks and the inability to pass in the single lane HOV that really functions as something of a super express...
In other words I'm not totally convinced that the issue is drivers not respecting them so much as their design having some genuine problems.
I really am inclined to think that if it's a general traffic HOV lane (as opposed to a true bus lane) that maybe it shouldn't be there with less than two lanes... and much more strongly suspect that a collector express system shouldn't go in with less than three lanes in each given how messy two lane express lanes get.
Which taken together would basically leave the following reasonable configurations*:
- 2-3 lanes conventional dual carriageway
- 3-6 lanes + 2 lanes HOV
- 3 lanes local + 3 lanes express
- 3 lanes local + 3 lanes express + 2 lanes HOV
Obviously this formula would allow for a couple more lanes in places, but even traffic engineers seem to be starting to understand that there are very much diminishing returns in traffic operations (never mind induced demand and other bigger picture issues with road widening) as a single bit of road gains additional general traffic lanes... I guess the real limit is probably six, which would leave the absolute maximum reasonable functional freeway a 6 local + 6 express + 2-3 HOV for 14-15 lanes per direction in 16 or 17 lanes of total width...
tl;dr: I think the HOV lane design is a bit of a mess, and that we should look at having fewer of them, but implementing with two lanes rather than one.
*whether ever going beyond two lanes in the HOV (especially if it's actually HOT) is reasonable is something I will leave to the engineers, but if I had to guess the answer would be along the lines of "rarely, but more often where you have HOV without a full express collector, and adding a true bus lane to the HOV will make sense more often".
PS: ugh, playing around with this gave me this awful feeling of understanding how it's possible to get into the headspace of traffic engineers. There's a lot of genuinely interesting tinkering to be had with road design, big picture be damned.
