Phil Charles

New Technology to Cut Freeway Congestion

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>As part of Melbourne’s $1.4 billion M1 upgrade project, a new traffic management system is being developed to effectively tackle congestion on the key freeway.

Victorian Roads Minister Tim Pallas has announced the $14 million contract to design the software for the new traffic management system has been awarded to Queensland company Transmax.

“The system is unique in Australia and will deliver significant improvements to the operation of the freeway, used by more than 160,000 motorists every day,” Mr Pallas said.

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Who’s on first?

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Optimising capacity of a road network through traffic incident management is a key strategy to managing congestion. With the realisation that it is not feasible or affordable to build our way out of congestion has come an interest in finding smarter ways of maintaining a given level of service.

However, congestion management may not be a core issue for all organisations involved in network operations and incident management. Public safety agencies are concerned about collecting evidence and fire and rescue cultures have a strong worker safety bias – and getting traffic moving is not a primary objective.

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Cost of Traffic Incidents

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Large urban areas are facing an increasing challenge of mobility (congestion), safety and environmental impacts due to traffic incidents.

Traffic incidents are estimated to account for about 25% of traffic congestion and bad weather another 15% (FHWA 2007). Hence congestion due to traffic incidents and bad weather can be as much as 40% of the total congestion.

Traffic incidents can have significant impacts on road users and the community. Injured people need to be recovered quickly from crashes and the potential for secondary incidents needs to be avoided. The safety or emergency responders and traffic controllers are at risk in moving traffic conditions.

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Implementation Issues for Congestion Charging

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Road user charging, be it in the form of tolled roads, HOT (high occupancy tolled) lanes or congestion pricing, is currently topical, largely as a consequence of traffic congestion and the shortage of funds to provide new capacity, but also in terms of the potential of the tool for generating revenue and managing travel demand.

London’s high profile Congestion-Charging Scheme has clearly raised congestion charging to the fore within the global transport debate. Yet a scheme suitable for London may not be suitable for other cities having different characteristics in terms of demographics, transport options and patterns of behaviour.

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Measurement valuation of public transport reliability

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Land Transport New Zealand has released a report that explores methods of measuring the value placed on public transport reliability in different contexts in New Zealand.

Reliability relates to an uncertainty in the time taken to travel from the start to the end of a person’s journey. For a public transport journey, reliability can affect users in one of two ways: as a delay when picking up the passenger and as a delay when the passenger is on the service. One or both of these sources of unreliability causes passengers to arrive at their destination at a different time than scheduled.

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RFID tags in the road hold promise for smarter vehicle location systems

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What makes intelligent vehicles smart? The ability of a vehicle to ‘know’ where it is at any given moment is one measure of intelligence that enables a host of intelligent transportation systems applications, from basic navigation assistance to automatic collision warning.

Many vehicle location and positioning applications are built around Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, which, in theory, provides the capability to locate a GPS-equipped vehicle anywhere on the Earth’s surface. However, in practice, GPS is limited by the need for clear ‘views’ of orbiting satellites; bridges, tunnels, and the urban canyons of downtown areas can block or interfere with GPS signals, resulting in unacceptable gaps in service.

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Using Transport Models to Evaluate Energy, Climate Change and Air Quality Impacts

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Energy: Strategic transport models output vehicle flows and average link speeds on road and public transport network links. Flows are usually categorised by vehicle type, typically passenger cars; and commercial vehicles (disaggregated by light, medium and heavy commercial vehicles), as well as bus flows and bus speeds. Average speed and fuel consumption relationships may be used to estimate total fuel consumption on each link. National evaluation guidelines in Australia recommend typical values for a number of evaluation parameters, including fuel consumption estimation.

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Improve mobility to mitigate congestion?

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Congestion has many potential causes and improving mobility helps mitigate the problem. Reducing congestion means reduced delay, more predictable and lower trip times, lower travel costs and reduced emissions.

The first option to be considered is to make better use of existing infrastructure as they are usually most cost-effective, are flexible in being tailored to each particular situation, can be implemented rapidly and provide publicly visible changes.

Quick clearance of traffic incidents has the potential for considerable reductions in congestion. Attention to traffic flows at road works sites is also important.

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Why have a quick clearance policy?

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In high traffic congested areas rapid clearance of incidents results in positive perceptions by road users and engenders support from government, especially in relation to funding traffic operations.

Quick clearance is the practice of rapidly and safely removing temporary obstructions from the roadway. To find out more see the Transportation Research Board synthesis in 2003 titled Safe and Quick Clearance of Traffic Incidents.

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