Economics and Finance

Wireless magnetic sensor networks offer a very attractive, low-cost alternative to inductive loops for traffic measurement in freeways and at intersections. In addition to vehicle count, occupancy and speed, the sensors yield traffic information (such as vehicle classification) that cannot be obtained from loop data. Because such networks can be deployed in a very short time, they can also be used (and reused) for temporary traffic measurement. This paper reports the detection capabilities of magnetic sensors, based on two field experiments. The first experiment collected a two-hour trace...

PeMS is a freeway performance measurement system for all of California.  It processes 2 GB/day of 30-second loop detector data in real time to produce useful information. Managers at any time can have a uniform, and comprehensive assessment of freeway performance.  Traffic engineers can base their operational decisions on knowledge of the current state of the freeway network.  Planners can determine whether congestion bottlenecks can be alleviated by improving operations or by minor capital improvements.  Travelers can obtain the current shortest route...

The San Francisco Bay Area regularly experiences some of the most severe traffic congestion in the U.S. This past year both Inrix and the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) ranked the Bay Area third only to Washington D.C. and Los Angeles in the time drivers spend stuck in traffic. The TTI estimated that traffic congestion cost the Bay Area economy a staggering $3.1 billion in 2014 (Lomax et al., 2015). Such estimates are based on the premise that moving more slowly than free-flow speeds wastes time and fuel, and that these time and fuel costs multiplied over millions of travelers in...

This report documents the second year of a project using economics experimental techniques to investigate novel approaches for mitigating congestion caused by non-recurring traffic incidents. The first year demonstrated the feasibility of this approach and carried out a number of experiments using University of California, Irvine (UCI) undergraduates as experimental subjects. The experimental platform is described in Section 3 of this report. Most of the experiments conducted during the first year examined different variable message sign (VMS) wording, and later experiments examined...