Assessment of travel time reliability with and without the dynamic use of the hard shoulder field test from a french motorway

Traffic management aims to ensure a high quality of service for most users, by decreasing congestion and increasing safety. However, uncertainty regarding travel times decreases the quality of service and leads end-users to modify their plans whatever the average travel time. e. Indicators describing travel time reliability are being developed and should be used in the future both for the optimization and for the assessment of active traffic management operation. This paper describes a managed lane experience on a motorway weaving section in France Hard Shoulder Running operation at rush hours. The paper focuses on travel time reliability indicators and on their use for reliability assessment. It provides some discussions on the advantages and drawbacks of reliability indicators under different traffic conditions. It particularly shows the difference between using whether buffer times whether buffer indexes. The paper also discusses the difficulty of interpreting the skew of travel time distribution for travel reliability.