Tag Archives: travel time

Research, Traffic and Safety

New System Measures Travel-Time Reliability to Reduce Traffic Delays

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Researchers for the Minnesota Department of Transportation have developed a new travel-time reliability measurement system that automates the process of gathering and managing data from multiple sources, including traffic, weather and accident databases, to generate travel-time reliability measures and reports for the metropolitan freeway network.

What Was the Need?

Improving traffic efficiency has become a key goal of traffic operations managers. In heavy traffic periods, MnDOT’s Regional Transportation Management Center (RTMC) coordinates with Minnesota State Patrol and MnDOT Maintenance Services to detect and quickly respond to freeway incidents in the Twin Cities. The RTMC works with the Freeway Incident Response Safety Team to assist and remove stranded vehicles using MnDOT emergency road service trucks. RTMC also updates real-time road condition information on its 511 traveler information system.

Overhead view of RTMC operator monitoring multiple screens
RTMC engineers use travel-time reliability data to plan for and respond to accidents, event traffic,
bad weather and road construction that cause freeway congestion.

MnDOT and RTMC measure delay and congestion on the metropolitan freeway system, reporting the data in annual reports like the 2017 Congestion Report. While useful, this data offers little predictive value on its own. MnDOT’s metropolitan freeway system features 4,000 loop detectors that transmit traffic data every 30 seconds; this data informs the congestion and delay reports.

Correlating this data with locations on the freeway system and various operating conditions, such as weather and traffic incidents, is time- consuming. But the data could be used to systematically evaluate traffic delays and develop strategies to mitigate congestion.

What Was Our Goal?

In this project, investigators sought to develop a system for automatically accessing weather, crash and traffic data to assess travel-time reliability—the variability in travel times for any given route. Travel-time reliability measures are becoming the key indicators for transportation system operations and management.

What Did We Implement?

Investigators developed a new travel-time reliability measurement system (TTRMS) that integrates different types of data (such as weather, traffic, incident, work zone and special event) acquired from multiple sources and automatically produces various types of travel-time reliability measures for selected corridors following user-specified operating conditions and time periods.

“Travel-time reliability is another way of looking at congestion and at strategies for making it more tolerable. It used to take several hours, even days, to process travel-time reliability data. The TTRMS processes it in minutes,” said Brian Kary, Director, MnDOT Regional Transportation Management Center.

How Did We Do It?

Investigators began by developing a detailed design of the TTRMS architecture—its modules, their functions and their interactions. The team then developed a work-zone data input module, where detailed lane configurations of a given work zone can be specified.

Developers designed a travel-time reliability calculation module as the core of the new system that can automatically access MnDOT’s traffic data archive, its incident database and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather database. It can also accept a set of input data for work zones, such as lane-closure periods and locations. The reliability calculation module was then integrated with user interfaces and reporting modules. Finally the integrated system was tested with the real data gathered in 2012 and 2013 from Interstates 35E and 35W, U.S. Highway 169 and State Highway 100.

What Was the Impact?

The system generated accurate travel-time reliability measures for the test periods and given operating conditions. In particular, the output measures were automatically generated in both table and graphical formats, thus saving traffic engineers significant amount of time and effort.

The TTRMS includes map-based interfaces, which provide administrators and general users with substantial flexibility in defining corridors, specifying operating conditions and selecting types of measures depending on the purposes of applications.

To test the new system’s performance, the research team used the TTRMS to evaluate traffic strategies deployed for the February 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis. Two weeks before the event, reliability was low for the freeway system serving the football stadium. During the week of the Super Bowl, MnDOT and the Department of Public Safety aggressively managed traffic incidents to keep traffic moving, and reliability rose substantially despite the increase in tourist traffic. In the days immediately after the Super Bowl, operational strategies returned to normal levels, and reliability fell to previous levels. Results suggest that aggressive incident management during this exceptionally high-volume regional event enhanced traffic efficiency.

What’s Next?

Further enhancements to the TTRMS should include automating inputs for work zone data, such as lane closures, changes in work zone locations and time periods. Future research could help traffic operations prioritize resources and develop short-term and long-term freeway improvements, including studies of bottlenecks and the freeway network’s vulnerability and resilience for natural events and large-scale incidents.

This post pertains to Report 2018-28, “Development of a Travel-Time Reliability Measurement System,” published September 2018.

 

Traffic and Safety

Major Ramp Metering Upgrade Reduces Freeway Delays

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Motorists are experiencing less delay on metro-area highways, thanks to major changes to the Twin Cities’ ramp metering system.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation has reconfigured ramp meters to be more in sync with real conditions. With changes to the turn-on and turn-off criteria, the meters are actually running for a shorter period of time and are only activated when needed.

Ramp meters are traffic lights placed on freeway entrance ramps that control the frequency that vehicles can enter the highway. Sensors embedded in the pavement collect the vehicle traffic data used to time approximately 440 ramp meters.

Staff at the Regional Transportation Management Center, which manages the ramp meters, say the whole system is operating better because of changes that were implemented approximately one year ago (based off a 2012 study).

University of Minnesota-Duluth professor Eil Kwon developed the system’s new software algorithms. In a case study of Highway 100, he found that the delay on the mainline dropped by nearly half.

On northbound Highway 100, the amount of “delayed vehicle hours” — defined as the vehicle hours of traffic flow with speeds less than 45 mph — that motorists experienced dropped 48 percent during the months of October and November in 2012 when compared to the same period in 2011. During the same time period, total volume on that section of northbound Highway 100 increased by 2.7 percent, Kwon said. In spring 2013, the amount of delayed vehicle hours had been reduced by 17 percent.

These results are preliminary, as additional analysis is needed to determine if these results are typical throughout the system on other freeway corridors. However, based on a personal savings of $16.50 per hour, the scenario described above represents a cost savings to motorists of $1,353 to $3,447 per day (depending on the season). That’s as much as $339,150 to $861,640 per year for just a six-mile stretch of highway.

More efficient

Under the old system, each ramp meter would turn on based on current traffic conditions, but the criteria to turn on were easily met, causing the meters to turn on too soon. The old system did not have turn-off criteria, allowing meters to run until a pre-set time of day.

With the new system, improvements were made to make the meters respond more appropriately to current traffic conditions. The turn-on criteria were improved so that meters come on only when needed, and turn-off criteria were added, allowing meters to turn off when traffic conditions improved.

The new metering system is particularly effective at reducing the number of meters operating on light traffic days.

“On days like the ones leading up to Thanksgiving, where traffic may be 10-to-15 percent less than normal, instead of, say, 150 ramp meters being on at a particular time, now maybe only 50 ramp meters will be operating,” explained MnDOT Freeway System Operations Engineer Jesse Larson.

Upgrades to the ramp metering system also allow for a better picture of what traffic is like at a given moment, because it’s now based on corridor density rather than traffic flow.

Traffic flow is the measurement of the number of vehicles passing a given point. Using traffic flow was flawed, in that similar traffic flows can occur at different speeds. The old system couldn’t differentiate between 1,000 cars passing by at 20 miles per hour versus 1,000 cars passing at 60 miles per hour, for example.

Corridor density, on the other hand, is the number of vehicles per lane per mile. By measuring density instead of traffic flow, the system has a more accurate picture of what current conditions are like on the freeway.

Another bonus: ramp meters will no longer release a bunch of cars simultaneously once an entrance ramp fills up. That’s because the system can now detect the ramp filling up and release the extra cars gradually instead.

The amount of hours vehicles wait at entrance ramps fell by nearly 50 percent during the fall months along a section of Highway 100.
Twin Cities ramp meters now turn on and off based on live traffic conditions.

Related Resources

Development of Freeway Operational Strategies with IRIS-in-Loop Simulation study

Research

MnDOT, LRRB Pick New Research Projects with Financials in Mind

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Minnesota’s transportation research governing boards put a new emphasis on financial benefits when selecting next year’s round of transportation research projects.

MnDOT’s Transportation Research Innovation Group (TRIG) and the Local Road Research Board announced their Fiscal Year 2016 funding awards this week after hearing proposals from researchers in several states. They selected 20 research proposals hall-marked by novel approaches to improving the environment, increasing transportation safety, improving construction methods and boosting the bottom line.

“We asked the principal investigator to present the safety and financial benefits up front, and how they can be implemented to improve the transportation system and economic viability of Minnesota,” said MnDOT Research Management Engineer Hafiz Munir. “We’re making a point early in the process to identify those potential benefits, quantify them and document them in our tracking system.”

Researchers will test new technology that could make crack-free pavements; find better, faster and less expensive ways to reclaim roads; and even explore how to use waste material from road construction projects as part of the landscaping to absorb water runoff.

Links are provided below to brief descriptions of each of the projects:

Bridges and Structures

Environment

Maintenance

Materials and Construction

Multimodal

Policy and Planning

Traffic and Safety