Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) may have the capability to relieve congestion by improving roadway capacity by enabling vehicles to safely follow each other with smaller headways than traditional vehicles. Several studies suggest this effect will be maximized when CAVs are able to platoon – or group together in long caravans without interruption from traditional vehicles. One way to stimulate platooning is to introduce dedicated lanes for CAVs. However, paving additional lanes would be expensive and preventing traditional vehicles from using one of the existing lanes would be detrimental to capacity when CAV market penetration rates are low. Policymakers and traffic engineers would benefit from knowing when dedicating a CAV lane would increase overall roadway performance. As such, this study aims to provide a basis for determining when the implementation of a Dedicated CAV Lane (DCAVL) would be beneficial to typical three-lane freeways. Total vehicle delay was used as the performance metric for assessing when it is ideal to have a DCAVL. Factors that can influence this decision – such as Market Penetration Rate (MPR) of CAVs, CAV-CAV headway, and demand volume – were considered for analysis. PTV Vissim was utilized to develop a microsimulation model for this analysis. 198 scenarios were created, each reflecting a unique combination of the input parameters. A base scenario with no DCAVL was used to serve as a basis for comparison. A scenario comparison analysis was utilized to ultimately determine when a DCAVL will cause total vehicle delay to improve beyond the base scenario. The results of this study indicate that a three-lane freeway with a DCAVL will consistently begin to outperform the same three-lane freeway without a DCAVL when the MPR is between 34% and 37%. This trend is impacted very minimally by the CAV-CAV headway and the demand volume of the scenario. While these results are subject to various limitations, they suggest that the successful implementation of a DCAVL may only be affected by the MPR of the scenario and that this MPR may fall within a very small range. As such, this research effectively provides a macroscopic view of the effects CAVs and DCAVLs will have on roadway performance and serves as a foundation for policymakers, traffic engineers, and researchers to base their future work upon.