The combination of continued travel growth and budget constraints makes it difficult for transportation agencies to provide sufficient roadway capacity in major metropolitan areas.
The US Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, and National Cooperative Highway Research Program sponsored a scanning study in July 2007 to examine congestion management programs and policies in Europe.
The report by the scanning team Active Traffic Management: The Next Step in Congestion Management examines congestion management programs and policies in Denmark, England, Greece, Germany, and the Netherlands. It covers European agency approaches to congestion, primary challenges and issues facing Europe, and moving toward active traffic management in the United States.
Congestion management strategies explored included speed harmonization, temporary shoulder use, queue warning, dynamic merge control, construction site management, truck restrictions, automated enforcement and dynamic lane marking, signing and rerouting.
The scanning team’s recommendations for US implementation include promoting active traffic management to optimise existing infrastructure during recurrent and nonrecurrent congestion, emphasising customer orientation, focusing on trip reliability, providing consistent messages to roadway users, and making operations a priority in planning, programming, and funding
processes.
A PDF copy of 88 page report is available from:
http://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl07012/atm_eu07.pdf