E – 1179 Increasing Freeway Capacity by Using Safety Lanes as Travel Lanes

This course discusses the use of safety shoulders as travel lanes to increase the capacity of existing highways. A succinct overview of efforts to use left or right shoulder lanes as temporary or interim travel lanes is presented. The impact on highway performance, operations, safety, maintenance, enforcement, incident response, and costs is discussed. Detailed case studies are presented for four U.S. states and three European countries.

This course is based on the U.S. Federal Highway Administration Report No. FHWA-HOP-10-023, “Efficient Use of Highway Capacity Summary,” by Beverly Kuhn, November, 2010.