A primary difficulty in evaluating most new traffic control and traffic operations systems that are developed, tested, and installedis to determine the impacts those systems have on traffic behavior.To collect the data necessary to evaluate the systems, researchers have traditionally used floating car surveys and other data collection techniques. However, it is costly to perform the number of floating car surveys required to accurately measure the reasonably small changes in travel times that individual vehicles accrue as a result of traffic control system improvements. A more cost-effective and potentially more accurate alternative to the floating car survey for collecting that travel time information is described. Observers with lap-top computers collect license plate information. A series of simple computer programs performs the required license plate matching and produces summaries describing the travel characteristics of the traffic stream. This method of data collection costs less than floating car surveys, provides a larger number of travel time runs for a given level of personnel involvement within a given period, and can provide additional information on the traffic stream being monitored-for example, origin-destination information--at no additional cost. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1271, Transportation data and information systems: current applications and needs 1990.
Abstract