Every region develops strategic mobility corridors. These corridors present continuous distress for citizens, businesses, transit and traffic operators desiring reliability and mobility for people and goods. The corridors are constrained in both time (arrivals patterns) and space (intersection capacity). Everyone desires the same space at the same time. Sunrise Boulevard in the Sacramento Region fits this description. The corridor routinely experiences multiple cycle failures and inefficient use of green time due to congested links and startup times. This paper describes the Sacramento Department of Transportation's (SacDOT) innovative efforts to improve operations. Sunrise is an ITS smart corridor with street and Traffic Operations Center infrastructure allowing daily detailed observation of conditions. Evaluating operations over time determined that flow characteristics and arrival patterns provided the potential to use an artificially high background cycle length to overcome temporal and spatial constraints. This potential operation was dubbed "supercycle", to be implemented when specific observed conditions existed. This paper discusses steps taken in implementing the supercycle. We begin with a drill down exercise that begins at the regional level and ends with a discussion of the three identified sub systems of the Sunrise system. This is done to aid the reader in understanding our environment as well as identifying their own potential environment.
Abstract