Traffic congestion and reliability : trends and advanced strategies for congestion mitigation.

Author(s)
Cambridge Systematics, Inc. & Texas Transportation Institute (TTI)
Year
Abstract

The report Traffic Congestion and Reliability: Trends and Advanced Strategies for Congestion Mitigation provides a snapshot of congestion in the United States by summarizing recent trends in congestion, highlighting the role of travel time reliability in the effects of congestion, and describing efforts to reduce the growth of congestion. This is the second in an annual series developed by the Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) Office of Operations. Much of the report is devoted to communicating recent trends in congestion. (See Figure ES.1 for an overview of congestion trends.) One of the key principles that the FHWA has promoted is that the measures used to track congestion should be based on the travel time experienced by users of the highway system. While the transportation profession has used many other types of measures to track congestion (such as "level of service"), travel time is a more direct measure of how congestion affects users. Travel time is understood by a wide variety of audiences—both technical and non-technical—as a way to describe the performance of the highway system. All of the congestion measures used in the report are based on this concept. The report pays particular attention to the concept of travel time reliability—how consistent travel conditions are from day-to-day—and strategies aimed at improving reliability. The variation in travel times is now understood as a separate component of the public's and business sector's frustration with congestion problems. Average travel times have increased and the report discusses ways to reduce them. But the day-to-day variations in travel conditions pose their own challenges and the problem requires a different set of solution strategies. The topics covered in this year's report include: Characteristics of congestion and travel reliability; Significance of reliability to travelers; Recent trends in congestion, especially reliability; Strategies to address congestion problems; and New tools and initiatives for dealing with congestion. (Author/publisher)

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Publication

Library number
C 34863 [electronic version only]
Source

Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Transportation DOT, Federal Highway Administration FHWA, 2005, 140 p.

Our collection

This publication is one of our other publications, and part of our extensive collection of road safety literature, that also includes the SWOV publications.