Continued growth in travel on congested freeway corridors exceeds agencies’ abilities to provide sufficient solutions and alternatives based on traditional roadway expansion and improvement projects. High construction costs, constrained right-of-way, statutory restrictions, and environmental factors are pushing agencies to explore solutions such as active traffic management and managed lanes, which improve safety by reducing collisions and nonrecurring congestion and maximize throughput under congested conditions. Finding cost-effective options to mitigate recurrent and non-recurrent congestion on freeway facilities is one of the most significant challenges State and regional transportation organizations face. Several countries are implementing managed motorway concepts to move higher traffic volumes on their freeways more efficiently without acquiring more land and constructing large-scale infrastructure projects. Managed motorway concepts introduce new and revised operational activities that place greater reliance on technology than traditional roadway projects. Managed motorways combine actively or dynamically managed operational regimes, specific infrastructure designs, and technology solutions. They use a range of traffic management measures to actively monitor the motorway based on real-time conditions: *Dynamically control speeds * Add capacity. * Inform road users of conditions on the network. The objective of implementing this range of measures is to optimize traffic and safety performance. Examples of these measures include shoulder running, variable speed limits, lane control signals, dynamic rerouting, and the provision of driver information using variable message signs. Managed motorway concepts applied in Europe have been proven to reduce collisions, improve journey time reliability, and increase vehicular throughput. (Author/publisher)
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