  We consider the scenario where human-driven/autonomous vehicles with low/high
occupancy are sharing a segment of highway and autonomous vehicles are capable
of increasing the traffic throughput by preserving a shorter headway than
human-driven vehicles. We propose a toll lane framework where a lane on the
highway is reserved freely for autonomous vehicles with high occupancy, which
have the greatest capability to increase social mobility, and the other three
classes of vehicles can choose to use the toll lane with a toll or use the
other regular lanes freely. All vehicles are assumed to be only interested in
minimizing their own travel costs. We explore the resulting lane choice
equilibria under the framework and establish desirable properties of the
equilibria, which implicitly compare high-occupancy vehicles with autonomous
vehicles in terms of their capabilities to increase social mobility. We further
use numerical examples in the optimal toll design, the occupancy threshold
design, and the policy design problems to clarify the various potential
applications of this toll lane framework that unites high-occupancy vehicles
and autonomous vehicles. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that
systematically studies a toll lane framework that unites autonomous vehicles
and high-occupancy vehicles on the roads.
