Reversible Lanes (HOT)

I've seen that happen in Cleveland.

It seems to only happen if I am coming out of a parking garage. I don't usually have "route" activated so I don't know if would tell me to go against the flow or not. But I can see plainly which way the cars are going so I follow suit and ignore Garmin.

Last Summer I was turning into a parking garage and Garmin told me I was going the wrong way. Poor thimg gets confused easy I guess.

I tend to ignore it when I'm not in-route. It's on because the car is on, and I basically use it to see streets ahead.

That the HOV lanes here would be as I see them in many US cities.
HOV in rush hour but open to anyone outside those hours.

They can't keep up with local changes, and tell you everything, all the time.

I'm curious if Google maps, or Waze have it marked. Driver-sourced info is usually very good.

Have quite a few of them in the San Diego area, and have FasTrak so use them quite a bit, but I've never seen a wrong way indication on either of my GPS units. They are both older, so maybe that capability wasn't designed into them yet. The older one doesn't even give a speed limit exceeded indication - on the newer one, my current speed turns red if I'm over the speed limit. But with both having lifetime map updates, they are still going strong - and my cost per update has now fallen below $3.50!

It is extremely difficult for companies like HERE and Google Maps to keep up with rapidly changing global traffic patterns. I doubt we will ever see these conditions displayed accurately 100% of the time.

As we all know, a GPS is a guide and it's information should never be used as a substitute for local signage or common sense.

This past weekend we had Waze and Garmin telling us part of the interstate was closed and kept trying to reroute us. Google and Apple Maps both said it was open. We kept going and discovered that that portion of the interstate was under construction. One of the lanes was closed but the route was still able to be traveled.

Cool

In many areas the HOV lane is simply the left lane that is reserved for high occupancy or otherwise permitted vehicles during rush hours; at other times of the day may be used as just another travel lane per local restrictions. I believe Brad is referring to specific lanes built within the median and are controlled by gates to become HOV travel lanes in one direction in the morning and reconfigured to the opposite direction in the afternoon perhaps automated depending on traffic loads. I recall seeing this in northern Virginia on I-95 coming into DC. I also recall at one point Dallas had a purpose built machine that looked like a snowplow that would shift specially built "Jersey Barriers" from one side of a lane to the other to flip that lane twice a day. As the gps devices have gotten more sophisticated, they apparently can detect that you are in a lane that it thinks is going the wrong way and so Samantha now wants you to be somewhere else and will nag the dickens out of you. I'm not sure there is an easy fix for this as different locales manage these reversing lanes differently. In my particular case, I'm often towing a trailer and so I have my avoids set to skip HOV lanes. Just for grins, turn on the HOV lane avoidances on your gps and see if Samantha complains when you're in one.

I disagree with this.

They keep up with traffic, and it works. They keep up with Weather fine. They even keep up with parking spaces, which is cool but kind of underused.

It seems like the next step is to query the DOTs across the USA (cache the data, of course) and the GPS should be able to tell you, and route you with:
- HOT lanes CLOSED (use regular lanes)
- HOT lanes OPEN (you'll go just as fast on regular lanes so use those)
- HOT lanes OPEN (and are faster) the current price for your route is $n.nn - Do you want to do that?

At the same time, it'd need to know the direction of the lanes, which you could gather from the open or closed bit. There's no reason they couldn't do this. I bet there's a REST API for each of the DOTs providing this information.

As for the lanes switching direction, these are usually timed throughout the week. The tolls are more to the minute but still seems doable.

I think a lot of this information is being pushed by the Drive App, for the Drive Model GPSs, and a lesser extent by the SmartLink App. And this is the proper place to push and update that info.

Most of this info is Time Critical and shouldn't try to be kept up with the installed Mapping Software. Not unless Garmin, and other makers, wish to start including two way cell units in the GPS, along with the added costs of the equipment.

SmartLink started out with a subscription model which soon passed to free basis. Drive was introduced with no fees. And as long as this information remains non-subscription, I support it fully. I don't want to have to change GPS equipment to keep up with Cell Technology. They have enough with just keep the maps up to date, with out updating hardware every time.

Is it fixed based on time or traffic volume. If it's volume based, it might be hard to ever get it right.

so my comments may be flawed, but my opinion is that changing the directions of the highways is probably done based only on the day of the week and the time of day.

I have three reasons for that opinion.

First, that is how it has always been done in the cities with reversible lanes in which I have driven. However, as I said above, I have only been in a few places with reversible lanes, so I do not have a large enough sample size to be certain that this is a universal practice.

Second, I would worry about problems with a system that uses current traffic volume to close and open bidirectional lanes. A simple fender-bender a few miles ahead of the switch-over point might create a false short-term reading of volume in each direction that snowballs into the sort of traffic jam that the switchover system is designed to minimize.

Third, using a system based on time allows locals to plan a route many miles in advance that may turn out to be a problem if the road is unexpectedly switched to favor the opposite direction. I can see the local politicians catching a lot of flack if that happens a couple of times, followed by the politicians dictating a change to a time-based system.

- Tom -