California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

Nonrecurrent traffic congestion caused by construction work constitutes a large proportion of the traffic congestion on highways. In TO 5300, we developed a comprehensive work zone traffic impact assessment procedure using a series of state-of-the-art dynamic network analysis tools as building blocks. This procedure is then implemented into a work zone traffic impact assessment software package called NetZone. This software package is capable of estimating time-dependent travel demand based on link counts, estimating demand diversion in response to work zone delay and various traffic management measures, showing traffic congestion level in the network over time, and providing network wide traffic performance measures with and without traffic congestion mitigation measures. The traffic performance measures provided in NetZone include average and longest delays, average and longest queue lengths, as well as the total delay in the network, before and during construction. Moreover, a friendly graphical userinterface makes NetZone easy to learn and use, and a preliminary case study shows that one canuse it to study a reasonably large network in a fraction of time that a micro-simulation package takes for the same network.

The developed methods and tools can help better plan and operate construction activities on highways, and more effectively manage traffic to reduce travel delays, both are consistent with Caltrans’s goals of increasing productivity and safety.