There is a wide disparity between the goals that state departments of transportation (DOTs) have for priced managed lanes and the public assumption for those goals. The public tends to be highly skeptical of priced managed lanes because the concept is difficult to explain to a nontechnical audience.

The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Synthesis 559: Emerging Challenges to Priced Managed Lanes provides an overview of the state of the practice of how state DOTs address challenges to implementing tolling, or pricing, on their managed lane systems.

The synthesis entailed an extensive literature review of 60 publications and over 700 online media articles, a survey distributed to all 50 state DOTs, and a sampling of six case examples that explained specific examples of how agencies addressed challenges.