The second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) focuses for a short time on a small number of large problems that confront transportation agencies: congestion, crashes, and the need to rebuild aging infrastructure. The mission is to strategically advance innovative ways to plan, renew, operate, and improve safety on the nation’s highways. To achieve this, research focuses on four related areas, including driving behaviour, highway capacity, travel time reliability, and rapid renewal methods. Travel time reliability is a relatively new, driver-focused way of looking at nonrecurring congestion. SHRP 2 Reliability research will result in a variety of products including performance measures, guidance on building reliability monitoring systems, an analysis tool for design treatments, a guide for improving the capability to manage and operate a highway system, messages and formats to communicate traveller information about reliability, training on incident management, and new ways of addressing nonrecurring congestion in planning and programming. Strategies to continually improve organizations to enhance reliability and to raise awareness among executive and political leadership are also addressed. Many of these products will prove cost-effective in helping states and local governments reduce traffic congestion and improve mobility. (Author/publisher)
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