Incident management improves safety and reduces delay. In principle, delay can be measured such that it can be used to estimate the benefits of incident management. Safety, on the other hand, is much harder to measure. So, the benefits of incident management in improving safety are difficult to quantify. Since safety is an important driving force behind incident management, the relation between incident management and safety remains for future research.
The National Data Warehouse (NDW) is a new initiative of the Ministry of Transportation, the different road authorities and municipalities. Its aim is to set up a national database in which traffic data is stored and made accessible for traffic managers and service providers. The availability of regional data as well as the their quality is likely to have an impact on the way operational traffic management is performed. It is however not clear what these impacts are. This pertains both to the way information is provided to the road users and to the way traffic management will be performed.
In order to make better use of existing roads, the lane width may be reduced so that more lanes are available on the same total road width. In principle, this is expected to increase traffic throughput, although with reduced speed. However, in practice, effects may be different. For instance, smaller lanes require a higher attention level of the drivers who may start showing signs of fatigue. This may compromise safety, inducing accidents. And accidents reduce traffic throughput. So, the question is under which circumstances narrow lanes do not compromise safety and increase throughput.
Economically seen, it makes sense to vary the cost of using the road with the availability of road capacity. Politically, it is difficult to implement in The Netherlands. Road pricing should lead to a better dsitributed load of traffic over the day and so to less congestion. Although, there may occur side effects which compensate the improvement. Road pricing comes in many forms. The question is which form is best suited for The Netherlands and what are the effects?
Road pricing is seen as one of the feasible measures both to reduce congestion as well as to better distribute the cost of road maintenance over the users. Internationally, quite some experience has been gained with road pricing. These experiences range from private toll companies to public agencies organizing road pricing. Various approaches may have different (dis) advantages. The question what lessons can be learned from these experience specifically for the situation in The Netherlands, with respect to obtaining most benefits in reducing congestion and more evenly distributing the cost of road maintenance.
In The Netherlands, large scale road maintenance works are planned for the next years. These works may cause huge impacts on traffic, given the fact that the network is already heavily loaded with traffic. Although these works are essential for keeping traffic moving in the long term, it is necessary as well to limit their short time impact. The question is, how can traffic management contribute to limit this impact?
The Dutch motorways are equipped with the motorway signalling system. This system warns for oncoming queues and may also be used for safeguarding incident locations. The same systems is used and is being extended in Sweden. The motorway signalling system was developed over 20 years ago. Its principles have remained unchanged but many practical adaptations have been made. With the onset of in-car technology and vehicle-infrastructure communications, many new possibilities arise. With new ambitions for traffic management, such as dynamic lane usage and dynamic speed limits, new requirements are posed to the signalling system. So, the question is how to… Read More »Motorway signalling system
VMS panels are widely used to provide information to road users. For instance, they indicate congestion downstream the location of the VMS panel. VMS panels are also used to warn drivers for incidents and provide other, general, information to drivers. Since recently, a new type of VMS panels is being implemented, which is not placed above the carriage way but immediately next to the carriageway. The new type of VMS panels is also used for all sorts of messages. Both types of VMS panels require drivers to divert their attention slightly away from their driving field of view in order… Read More »VMS panels cause congestion?
Traffic management is an important tool to relieve congestion problems. For traffic management knowledge about the current traffic situation is essential. Normally, the data that is used to keep traffic operators informed about the current traffic situations, comes from one or more sources, but is not integrated. For example: camera’s send their images to the control centre and loop detectors generate data about flows and speeds, but they are shown and used in different ways. The question now is if it is possible to integrate data from different sources (data fusion) in such a way that a better and more… Read More »Can data fusion improve traffic management?
Ramp metering an important traffic management measure in The Netherlands. Around the big cities a lot of ramp metering systems have been installed to improve the traffic flow on the motorways, by controlling the flow on on-ramps by means of a traffic light. Normally, ramp metering has a positive effect on the traffic flow on the motorway and a negative effect on the traffic on the on-rmap. For the control process a standard algorithm is used, but also a number of other algorithms are possible. Therefore, the research question is: can these ramp metering algorithms be improved? And what are the impacts of these… Read More »Improvement ramp metering