Traffic Operations and Management

The general objective of the project is to investigate and quantify the likely benefits of implementing various ATMS and ATlS control strategies on the real-life Santa Monica freeway corridor in Los Angeles.The different strategies to be tested in Phase 2 include freeway ramp metering, real-time traffic signal optimization, route guidance systems, and combinations of these strategies. Investigations of different strategies are performed for the same network conditions (portion of the Santa Monica freeway corridor previously coded in Phase 1) and under the same demand level (typical morning...

From an operations standpoint, the most important task of a traffic surveillance system is determining reliably whether the facility is free flowing or congested. The second most important task is responding rapidly when the facility becomes congested. Other tasks, such as quantifying the magnitude of congestion, are desirable, but tertiary. To address the first two tasks, this paper presents a new approach for traffic surveillance using existing detectors. Rather than expending a considerable effort to detect congested conditions, the research employs a relatively simple strategy to look...

TravInfo is a Field Operational Test (FOT) in advanced traveler information systems (ATIS) for the San Francisco Bay Area sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The project involves a public/private partnership which seeks to compile, integrate and broadly disseminate timely and accurate multi-modal traveler information through commercial products and services. This working paper is part of the Technology Element of the TravInfo evaluation. It presents the results of the "before" wave of the Value-Added-Reseller (VAR) study, in which 17 TravInfo registered VARs and 16 non-...

The introduction of electronic toll collection on the eight bridges crossing San Francisco Bay has provided the means for a relatively simple and low cost system for measuring travel times on many Bay Area bridges and roads. The toll tags sued for electronic toll collection can be read by readers at various locations on congested roads. The time of reading is recorded so that the time difference between when a vehicle passes one reader and passes the next can be computed. Such a system is already operating in Houston, where it is the primary source of travel time data. Capital costs per...