Traffic Operations and Management

This document contains detailed simulation results analysis and discussion for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Exploratory Advanced Research (EAR) project entitled Using Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) to Form High-Performance Vehicle Streams. The objective of this study is to obtain authoritative predictions of traffic impacts of ACC and CACC at various market penetrations and define the CACC operation strategies that create the most capacity and throughput improvement in the freeway traffic stream. A microscopic traffic simulation environment has been developed for...

The objective of this research project was to develop a better understanding of the possible alternatives that a large employment center, like the University of California at Santa Barbara, can adopt in order to better utilize transit, mitigate traffic, and reduce demand for on-site parking. Although this project was oriented to the UCSB campus, the techniques and approaches developed in this project were designed to be equally applicable elsewhere. There were three major elements of this project: 1) develop an understanding of commuting employees through the use of a survey, 2) identify...

This study employs traffic data and incident data from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. The conclusion in this study provides guidance on making policy about investing in VMS systems.Few studies utilize empirical traffic data. They either use costly surveys or conduct traffic simulation, which are expensive and may not conform well to reality. This study uses empirical traffic flow and occupancy data on both mainline and ramps, collected every 30 seconds to estimate the effectiveness of VMS. The variation of diversion rate before and after warning messages is...

During the last decade considerable research and development efforts have been devotedto automating vehicles in an effort to improve safety and efficiency of vehicular traffic.While dedicated highways with fully automated vehicles is a future objective, theintroduction of Intelligent Cruise Control (ICC) vehicles on current highways designed tooperate with manually driven vehicles is a realistic near term objective. The purpose ofthis report is to analyze the effects on traffic flow characteristics and environment whenICC vehicles with automatic vehicle following capability (in the same...