Development of a System Analysis Method for the Highway Capacity Manual

The Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) is a major reference for evaluating the capacity and quality of service of road facilities. However, the existing procedures cannot evaluate highway networks or the interactions between freeways and urban streets. The main purpose of this research is to develop new methods for the HCM in order to modify the freeway analysis methods and the urban street methods so that the effects of operations from one facility to the other can be evaluated. The first part of the method evaluates queue spillback into freeways, while the second part evaluates queue spillback into urban streets. Detector data and video recordings were obtained from several locations across the country and complemented with microsimulation scenarios to model the impacts of queue spillback into freeway facilities and into ramp terminals (signalized and unsignalized interchanges). The last part provides a step-by-step framework for obtaining origin-destination travel times throughout the network.