Business 80/Capital City Freeway: WX Freeway Rebuild

[jrouse]

My hope is that they will add an HOV lane to the freeway,  instead of taking an existing mixed use lane and turning it into a HOV lane like they did along I-80 near Vallejo. additionally HOV lanes could also be set to be operational 24 hours a day like they are in southern California. Also i wonder if it would be prudent to stripe off the HOV lane and limit access to the lane at specific points as in many metro areas including LA, ATL, MIA, etc

It is a general practice for Caltrans to implement HOV lanes as a new lane, not through a conversion.  This has been the practice since the 1976 "diamond lane" project on I-10 in Los Angeles where an existing lane in each direction was converted to HOV.  The new HOV lane on US-50 would be a lane addition, not a takeaway.  The HOV lanes on I-80 in the Bay Area were built as new lanes, not through a takeaway.

There is a short section of HOV lanes on Business 80 here in Sacramento that were a takeaway; that was due to the high costs and low benefits associated with widening the freeway in that section, which is composed of a lot of bridges. 

There will be a somewhat lengthy takeaway occurring on I-5 in Stockton when HOV lanes open there in the next year or so.  This is because much of the project involves adding a lane in each direction to a facility that currently is 6 lanes.  That widened section ties into an 8-lane section of freeway at its southern end.  That 8-lane section of freeway is relatively short, but it also includes a lot of structures, and so it would not be cost-effective to widen it to 10 lanes.  So they decided to convert one lane in each direction to HOV.  The traffic studies done for the project showed that there is a fairly high level of HOV-2 usage on that part of the freeway, so there would be some operational benefits with the takeaway.