United States. Dept. of Transportation. Research and Innovative Technology Administration

009IY01

Tech Report

Indiana

669194351

NEXTRANS Center (U.S.)

NTL-OPERATIONS AND TRAFFIC CONTROLS-Traffic Flow ; NTL-INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS-INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS ;

Intellgent transportation system (ITS) technologies are utilized to manage traffic flow and safety in

highway work zones. Traffic management plans for work zones require queuing analyses to determine

the anticipated traffic backups, but the predictions are often inaccurate mainly because of lack of

understanding of traffic flow characteristics in WZ. The current procedures for determining speed and

capacity are inadequate and don’t consider the fundamental effects of ITS technologies in traffic flow

and drivers behavior. This study will address of traffic flow characteristics in Intelligent WZ and will

determine methods for computing work zone capacity. Accurate determination of work zone capcity is

very important because it significantly affects the speed and user's cost computations. Various ITS

applications are implemented in the US (such as speed photo enforcement (SPE), dynamic lane

management, variable speed control, travel time information display, dynamic rerouting, etc), but a

major study to determine how traffic flow characteristics are affected in these intelligent WZ has not

been conducted. This study investigated the fundamental relationship among traffic flow variables in a

WZ where ITS was implemented for mainly as a speed control measure. A theoretical relationship was

developed using field data collected in work zones.

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US Transportation Collection