Active Traffic Management Strategies: A Planning and Evaluation Guide (2024)
Chapter: Summary
SUMMARY
Active Traffic Management Strategies: A Planning and Evaluation Guide
Persistent congestion and safety concerns continue to challenge transportation professionals in the United States and around the world. Both recurring and nonrecurring congestion continues to increase, leading to longer delays, higher fuel consumption, greater environmental impacts, reduced productivity, and more crashes. Agencies recognize their inability to add capacity and enhance the safety of their transportation networks quickly and cost-effectively. Thus, they rely on transportation systems operations and management strategies to mitigate mobility and reliability impacts. Over the past few decades, many success stories and advances in freeway management, arterial management, and regional coordination have emerged. Today, most agencies have detection levels and operational capabilities that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago, and these capabilities can be leveraged for a wide variety of approaches to improve mobility and safety.
Transportation professionals acknowledge the importance of identifying appropriate active traffic management (ATM) strategies for potential implementation in their jurisdictions. Successful examples from Europe and deployments in the United States have spurred increased interest in ATM applications across the country. However, as agencies consider ATM strategies, they face the following fundamental questions that must be answered quickly and efficiently to identify which strategies to advance.
- How can agencies incorporate ATM strategies into regional plans and optimize projects to meet regional mobility goals?
- What facilities or corridors are best suited for ATM strategies in the region?
- How can the available ATM strategies be analyzed?
- Does a combination of ATM strategies yield additive benefits?
- What are the potential benefits of ATM?
- What are the best ways to engage the public in the discussion about new operating strategies?
- What will select ATM strategies cost in the near and long term?
ATM is the ability to manage recurrent and nonrecurrent congestion, both dynamically and proactively, on an entire facility based on real-time or predicted traffic conditions. Focusing on trip reliability, ATM strategies maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of a facility while increasing throughput and enhancing safety. ATM strategies rely on the use of integrated systems with new technologies, including comprehensive sensor systems, real-time data collection and analysis, and automated dynamic deployment to optimize system performance quickly and, in some cases, without the delay that occurs when operators must deploy operational strategies manually. When various ATM strategies are implemented in combination, they can work to fully optimize the existing infrastructure and provide measurable benefits to the transportation network and the motoring public. One of
the benefits of these new systems is that they allow for the dynamic or real-time automated operation of traffic management strategies that more quickly respond to changing conditions as they occur. The strategies included in this guide, while not exhaustive, are adaptive ramp metering, adaptive traffic signal control, dynamic junction control, dynamic lane reversal, dynamic lane-use control, part-time shoulder use, queue warning, transit signal priority, and variable speed limits. These strategies form the foundation of the ATM concept.
In addition to improving daily operations on the network, ATM can play a role in addressing the larger challenges facing agencies, including safety, sustainability and resilience, and equity. The following sections provide a brief look at how ATM can support initiatives to improve transportation options for the traveling public and the impacts of the network on the quality of life for communities.
This guide intends to provide planning and evaluation guidelines to transportation agencies so they can easily identify the appropriate path forward with ATM strategies suited to their regional needs and characteristics. Agencies considering ATM will be able to identify appropriate performance goals and measures for planned projects and select ATM strategies to consider for those projects. They will also be able to select the appropriate analysis tool(s) to evaluate the likely impacts of those projects and plan for the collection of field performance data and analysis of that data for performance-based planning and operations. Additionally, they will be better prepared during the project development and implementation processes by knowing appropriate budgetary and staffing needs for ATM operations and maintenance and being aware of critical institutional factors that can either be instrumental to success or derail a project.
Agencies need beneficial information related to ATM in all areas and levels of transportation planning. They need resources that directly link the transportation planning and programming process with operations to assess which operational strategies they might include in regional transportation planning that have the potential to provide the most benefit to the regional transportation network. Furthermore, agencies need resources that highlight the major attributes of candidate corridors that help determine if any ATM strategy or combination of strategies is suitable and appropriate as well as how they can help an agency best respond to the mobility, safety, and environmental needs of the corridor and broader community. It is the intent of the guide to deliver such resources to maximize the potential positive impacts of ATM across the country.
The intended audiences for this guide include planning, design, and operations practitioners primarily involved with implementing and operating ATM strategies on freeways and arterial streets. Specific agencies include but are not limited to federal, state, and local planning and implementing agencies; metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs); departments of transportation (DOTs); state, local, and regional toll and mobility agencies; transit agencies; municipalities; enforcement entities; maintenance and maintenance service entities; consultants; and any regional stakeholder groups who have a vested interested in the safety and mobility of the traveling public.
