News Tagged: Congestion
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OTREC research aids Oregon Department of Transportation with placing traffic devices
Tags: congestion, devices, management, odot, otrec, psu, reliability, traffic, travel time, vms
OTREC research looks into effects of traffic signal optimization
An OTREC project recently took an in-depth look at the travel-time and health-related effects of a new implementation of a state of the art adaptive traffic system.
Southeast Powell Boulevard is a multimodal urban corridor connecting highway US-26 through Portland, Oregon. The corridor is highly congested during morning and evening peak traffic hours. In October 2011, an adaptive traffic system called SCATS was deployed.
The primary function of SCATS, or Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System, is to mitigate traffic congestion. Using sensors (usually inductive loops) at each traffic signal, the system tries to find the best cycle time and phasing along the corridor as traffic demand patterns change.
In this integrated multimodal study, OTREC researchers looked at the corridor’s traffic speed and transit reliability, before and after the implementation of SCATS. In addition, a novel contribution of this study was to study the link between signal timing and air quality.
Tags: congestion, emissions, figliozzi, mitigation, otrec, psu, scats, transit, trimet, tsp
Research explores the value of travel-time reliability
When planning their daily commute, most drivers account for the traffic they know is unavoidable: at peak times of day, like morning and afternoon rush hour, they probably allow extra time to get where they’re going.
The delays that are harder to accept are the unexpected ones, when accidents, road work, or a traffic bottleneck turn a thirty minute trip into an hour.
This unpredictable postponement leads to natural frustration on the part of drivers, as it may cause them to be late to work or late picking up children from school. A reliable road network is one in which this is a rare occurrence.
A project led by Portland State University’s Miguel Figliozzi explored the value of this travel-time reliability using a study of commuters’ route choice behavior, taking a look at the trade-offs between reliability, traffic congestion, and air pollution.
The details for the combined project can be found here.
In the first phase of the research, co-investigators David Levinson and Kathleen Harder of the University of Minnesota sought to measure the route choices drivers made in a real-world setting. Instead of just having people fill out a survey about whether they would choose to take major roads or the freeway to work, this study ambitiously placed GPS units in the cars of volunteers, to measure their actual behavior based on factors that arose each day.
They wanted to determine the importance of reliability in commuters’ route choices. If travelers could ensure reaching their destinations in a time-certain manner, the researchers thought, they might be willing to drive on paths with longer travel-times rather than risking the use of paths with shorter travel-times but higher variability.
Tags: alex bigazzi, congestion, emissions, livability, miguel figliozzi, otrec, portland state university
Graduate student takes research to southeast Asia
Graduate student researcher Alex Bigazzi, of Portland State University, will present his work in Vietnam next week.
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is hosting a transportation workshop in Ho Chi Minh city. The opportunity for Bigazzi to attend is the result of a spontaneous connection he made recently at a conference in Annapolis, Maryland, where he was giving a paper on truck-specific traffic management.
Large trucks contribute a large share of emissions, especially when traveling at a slow crawl through heavy traffic. Bigazzi’s work explores ways to mitigate the effects of this traffic congestion on air quality.
Bigazzi presented two papers at the 54th Annual Transportation Research Forum, which took place March 21-23 in Annapolis. One of them, “The Emissions Benefits of Truck-Only Lane Management,” offers a better understanding of the impacts of congestion on heavy-duty vehicles.
After a question-and-answer exchange, he was invited to present the same research in Vietnam’s largest city.
Tags: alex bigazzi, apec, congestion, emissions, livability, miguel figliozzi, otrec, portland state university
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