Hitchhiking is a means of transportation that is gained by asking individuals, usually strangers, for a ride in their car or other vehicle. The ride is usually, but not always, free.
A high-occupancy vehicle lane is a restricted traffic lane reserved for the exclusive use of vehicles with a driver and at least one passenger, including carpools, vanpools, and transit buses. These restrictions may be only imposed during peak travel times or may apply at all times. There are different types of lanes: temporary or permanent lanes with concrete barriers, two-directional or reversible lanes, and exclusive, concurrent, or contraflow lanes working in peak periods.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County (METRO) is a major public transportation agency based in Houston, Texas, United States. It operates bus, light rail, bus rapid transit, HOV and HOT lanes, and paratransit service in the city as well as most of Harris County. It also operates bus service to two cities in Fort Bend County, and to Conroe in Montgomery County. The Metro headquarters are in the Lee P. Brown Administration Building in Downtown Houston. In 2023, the system had a ridership of 77,189,800, or about 244,300 per weekday as of the second quarter of 2024.
Carpooling is the sharing of car journeys so that more than one person travels in a car, and prevents the need for others to have to drive to a location themselves. Carpooling is considered a Demand-Responsive Transport (DRT) service.
A rush hour or peak hour is a part of the day during which traffic congestion on roads and crowding on public transport is at its highest. Normally, this happens twice every weekday: once in the morning and once in the afternoon or evening, the times during which most people commute. The term is often used for a period of peak congestion that may last for more than one hour.
Vanpools or vanpooling is an element of the transit system that allow groups of people to share the ride similar to a carpool, but on a larger scale with concurrent savings in fuel and vehicle operating costs and thus usually a lower cost to the rider. Vanpools have a lower operating and capital cost than most transit vehicles in the United States, but due to their relatively low capacity, vanpools often require subsidies comparable to conventional bus service.
The Harbor Transitway is a 10.3-mile (16.6 km) shared-use express bus corridor and high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes running in the median of Interstate 110 between Downtown Los Angeles and the Harbor Gateway Transit Center in Gardena, California. Buses also make intermediate stops at 37th Street/USC, Slauson, Manchester, Harbor Freeway, and Rosecrans stations. The facility opened for two-person carpools on June 26, 1996, for buses on August 1, 1996 and was converted to HOT lanes as part of the Metro ExpressLanes project on November 10, 2012.
The El Monte Busway is a 12-mile (19 km) shared-use express bus corridor (busway) and high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes running along Interstate 10 between Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles and Interstate 605 or El Monte Station in El Monte, California. Buses also make intermediate stops at Cal State LA station and LA General Medical Center station. The busway opened in January 1973 to buses only, three-person carpools were allowed to enter in 1976, and the facility was converted to HOT lanes as part of the Metro ExpressLanes project on February 22, 2013.
A Texas T, also called a T-ramp, is a T-shaped highway ramp that combines entrance and exit ramps into a single structure that allows entrance and exit to the left (inside) lanes of an expressway. It is intended to avoid traffic congestion caused by large numbers of high-occupancy vehicles crossing several lanes near exits.
Washington, D.C. has a number of different modes of transportation available for use. Commuters have a major influence on travel patterns, with only 28% of people employed in Washington, D.C. commuting from within the city, whereas 33.5% commute from the nearby Maryland suburbs, 22.7% from Northern Virginia, and the rest from Washington, D.C.'s outlying suburbs.
The United States is served by a wide array of public transportation, including various forms of bus, rail, ferry, and sometimes, airline services. Most public transit systems are in urban areas with enough density and public demand to require public transportation; most US cities have some form of public transit. In more auto-centric suburban localities, public transit is generally less frequent and less common. Most public transit services in the United States are either national, regional/commuter, or local.
A high-occupancy toll lane is a type of traffic lane or roadway that is available to high-occupancy vehicles and other exempt vehicles without charge; other vehicles are required to pay a variable fee that is adjusted in response to demand. Unlike toll roads, drivers have an option to use general purpose lanes, on which a fee is not charged. Express toll lanes, which are less common, operate along similar lines, but do not exempt high-occupancy vehicles.
Shared transport or shared mobility is a transportation system where travelers share a vehicle either simultaneously as a group or over time as personal rental, and in the process share the cost of the journey. It is a transportation strategy that allows users to access transportation services on an as-needed basis, and can be regarded as a hybrid between private vehicle use and mass or public transport. Shared mobility is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of transportation modes including carsharing, Bicycle-sharing systems, ridesharing companies, carpools, and microtransit.
Virginia HOT lanes refers to seven separate projects in the U.S. state of Virginia.
Zimride by Enterprise Holdings was an American carpool program that matched inter-city drivers and passengers through social networking services. It was offered to universities and businesses as a matchmaking service. The company was founded in May 2007. After the launch of the Lyft app in May 2012 for intra-city rides, the Lyft app rapidly grew and became the focus of the company. Zimride officially renamed as Lyft in May 2013, and the Zimride service was sold to Enterprise Holdings in July 2013. As of July 2013, the service had over 350,000 users and had partnerships with Facebook and Zipcar.
Carma Technology Corporation is a real-time transportation technology company headquartered in Cork, Ireland. Its flagship product, Carma Carpooling, matches users with nearby commuters and enables them to share the cost of driving. Carma also has offices in San Francisco, California and Austin, Texas.
A car jockey, also known as a traffic jockey and known in Indonesian as joki three-in-one, was someone in Indonesia who had resorted to informal employment to bypass the gridlock that grips Indonesia's largest cities, especially Greater Jakarta. They were paid by drivers to ride on vehicles so that those vehicles would be qualified to use high-occupancy vehicle lanes. Like atappers and ojeks, it was one method Indonesians have become accustomed to in their daily commuting struggle.
A ridesharing company, ride-hailing service, is a company that, via websites and mobile apps, matches passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire that, unlike taxis, cannot legally be hailed from the street.
A managed lane is a type of highway lane that is operated with a management scheme, such as lane use restrictions or variable tolling, to optimize traffic flow, vehicle throughput, or both. Definitions and goals vary among transport agencies, but managed lanes are generally implemented to achieve an improved operational condition on a highway, such as improving traffic speed and throughput, reducing air pollution, and improving safety. Types of managed lanes include high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, high-occupancy toll lanes, express toll lanes, reversible lanes, and bus lanes. Most managed lane facilities are located in the United States and Canada, although HOV and bus lanes can be found in many other countries; outside of the US and Canada, many countries use active traffic management that manage all lanes of a highway.
