CUTR Webcast Recording: Bringing Order to Chaos: The Growing Role of Proactive Traffic Management Solutions

October 24, 2017, 12:00PM (ET)

Bringing Order to Chaos: The Growing Role of Proactive Traffic Management Solutions

Increasingly, proactive traffic management strategies can be deployed on freeways and arterials with the aim of improving safety while reducing congestion and emissions. The toolbox of applications usually includes ramp metering, variable speed limit systems, advanced traffic signal control, traffic information, incident management, multimodal corridor management, and high occupancy/toll managed lanes. This presentation will present an overview of proactive traffic management solutions that fit particular problems. A case study of a worldwide analysis of variable speed limit (VSL) systems will be presented. VSL is usually applied to harmonize traffic flow during congestion, weather and construction events. A summary of applications and algorithms uncovered during an international survey will be described, along with detailed analyses from several corridors in the U.S. and in Europe. Example evaluation results will be shown, including impacts on safety, travel time, travel time reliability and driver compliance. These analyses will illuminate new rollouts of proactive traffic management solutions. By providing system performance feedback derived from high resolution empirical data, we can shed light on options for improving system performance. Download Handout

Presenter: Robert L. Bertini, Ph.D., P.E., Director, Center for Urban Transportation Research

Robert L. Bertini, Ph.D., P.E. is the Director of the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida. He is also Professor (courtesy appointment) in the Patel College of Global Sustainability at USF. He earned his B.S. in Civil Engineering from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, an M.S. in Civil Engineering from San Jose State University, and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests are in sustainable transportation solutions, traffic flow theory informed by empirical and experimental measurements, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), multimodal transportation “big data” for improving performance measurement, planning and operations, and proactive traffic management and operations. He chairs the National Academies’ Transportation Research Board Operations Section, and received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Bertini served as Professor at Portland State University and Deputy Administrator of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration at the U.S. Department of Transportation.