01099275

Component

To better understand the characteristics of traffic congestion and efficiently employ congestion measures for interstate highway systems, this study examined the measures of the percent of congestion and the duration of continuous congestion. As expected, these congestion measures provided different results regarding the congestion severity of an interstate highway segment, which meant that the use of a single measure could not give a reliable evaluation result. Thus, in order to minimize the potential bias and enhance the advantage of each congestion measure, this study proposed the composite congestion measure representing the congestion severity. As a result, it seemed that the proposed composite congestion measure well identified the levels of the congestion severity of interstate highway segments because this proposed measure contained information on congestion characteristics estimated by both the percent of congestion and the duration of continuous congestion. Thus, this proposed composite congestion measure may be a potential candidate of congestion severity measures and can provide a proper guideline for transportation engineers or decision-makers so that they can efficiently decide which interstate segment should be improved. In addition, this proposed congestion measure may be applied to evaluate the effectiveness of various congestion mitigation programs (before-after studies) such as ITS applications.

01084478

08-0900

English

14p

2008

Transportation Research Board 87th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Maps; References (25) ; Tables (3)

Intelligent transportation systems; Interstate highways; Operations; Telematics; Traffic characteristics; Traffic congestion; Traffic flow; Traffic volume; Transportation engineers

Administration and Management; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2008 Paper #08-0900

TRIS, TRB

Jan 29 2008 3:14PM