Reliability of travel times: the importance of network structure and optimal road capacity. Robustness is the ability of traffic networks to cope with exceptional changes in the demand and supply pattern (e.g. due to serious accidents, emergencies, evacuations). Resilience refers to the capability of the network to recover from serious disruptions. This paper discusses the importance of network structure in assuring a robust and resilient network. The paper proposes a network structure that is efficient at handling traffic in normal conditions and provides for spare capacity in exceptional situations. A less efficient solution is to equip a network with dedicated emergency bypasses. The optimal capacity of such bypasses turns out to be very high as we show in the second part of our paper. (Author/publisher)
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