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Federal Highway Administration Research and Technology
Coordinating, Developing, and Delivering Highway Transportation Innovations

 
REPORT
This report is an archived publication and may contain dated technical, contact, and link information
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Publication Number:  FHWA-HRT-16-064    Date:  November 2016
Publication Number: FHWA-HRT-16-064
Date: November 2016

 

Traffic Bottlenecks: Identification and Solutions

CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSIONS

The TTI’s 2012 Urban Mobility Report highlights a number of disturbing trends related to degradation of surface transportation.(1) Each of these trends could be highly detrimental to the quality of life for U.S. citizens. U.S. traffic congestion is worsening, and the resulting economic damages are increasing. Environmental impacts are accelerating the economic damages from traffic congestion. Reliability of surface transportation is decreasing, requiring drivers to depart earlier to ensure on-time arrival at their destinations.

Mitigation or elimination of traffic bottlenecks is believed to be a top priority. This report was intended to update the traditional approaches to congestion and provide new solutions. One of the modernized approaches was a comprehensive framework for congestion and bottleneck treatments developed for this report. The framework begins with a thorough definition of terminology and proceeds to a flowchart (playbook) of bottleneck classifications. Within the 7 main classifications are 70 possible solutions. The appendix of this report provides technical details on the 70 playbook solutions.

Despite the ease-of-use of the playbook, certain strategies have a strong tendency to outperform others. This report presents additional research on a much smaller set of bottleneck mitigation strategies, which are expected to be cost effective. For this small set of featured strategies, micro-simulations and B/C analyses were performed. The report further encourages States to consider alternative interchange/intersection designs (i.e., DDI, DLTI, RCUT, MUT, DLT, and roundabouts), provides a quick summary of their benefits, and provides references for additional information.

Beyond the bottleneck mitigation strategies, this report recognizes a need for improved methods of congestion identification to justify transportation investments. New methods of traffic measurement and modeling (e.g. INRIX®, 2016 HCM, etc.) provide rich sources of data for congestion analysis, accounting for influential factors (e.g., weather, incidents, demand variability, etc.) in a more robust and explicit manner.(45) STM quantifies congestion visually. Performance measures derived from the STM can further quantify congestion statistically. The STMs and related performance measures, shown in this report as case studies, were generated by software tools. These tools will be available for interested States and transportation departments and will hopefully lead to more scientific assessments of congestion in some areas.

 

 

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