Georgia Manages Lane Use to Improve Highway Efficiency  

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As bulldozers and backhoes start digging away at stimulus-funded road construction projects, one researcher is looking for ways to maximize the existing road infrastructure through computers and calculations.

Randall Guensler, a professor at Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is currently working on the latest phases of two Georgia-based studies of "managed lane use," in which drivers are encouraged to adopt behaviors that improve traffic flow. Two well-known examples of managed lane use include congestion pricing and fee-for-entry limited access lanes.

"Many experts now believe that actively managing lane use can provide greatly improved service without having to construct extra lanes," Guensler said in a statement. "These managed-lane strategies can be implemented for minimal cost, especially when compared to the land and construction cost, the traffic problems and the demolition issues involved in building new roads." Georgia's two pilot programs, Commute Atlanta and The Congestion Pricing Project, are collecting data about whether lane management works and how drivers feel about it.

Reducing the number of cars on the road during peak hours adds to highway capacity, as a roadway can handle more vehicles per hour when bottlenecks and jams are reduced or eliminated. According to Guensler, more vehicles per hour can travel through limited-access lanes because they are less traveled and therefore less congested. "From an engineering standpoint, traffic flow is the product of vehicle speed and traffic density – that is, the speed of the vehicles and how closely are they following each other," he said.

Commute Atlanta collected data from GPS trackers installed in the cars of 470 Atlanta-area volunteer households. At first, average household travel patterns were collected and analyzed. Households who were able to reduce their monthly totals were given financial incentives. In the next phase, commuters will endure simulated peak-hour congestion pricing in which drivers are charged for travel during peak hours. This phase will also test improved tracking devices that eliminate toll booths by automatically detecting and charging drivers who have entered limited access lanes or traveled during peak hours.

If thoughts of tracking devices make you nervous, you may want to participate in the focus groups of The Congestion Pricing Project, separate from Commute Atlanta but also involving Guensler. The project analyzed the opinions of Atlanta-area drivers regarding congestion pricing and limited-access lanes through a series of focus groups. Some of the results were surprising: "Our focus group work revealed interesting points, including the fact that income groups that wouldn’t generally use value priced lanes still liked having them available," Guensler said. "There are times when everyone finds that these lanes are a good economic decision -- such as when you’re late for daycare, and you’re facing dollar-a-minute overtime charges."

Guensler was hard at work when Wired contacted him, but he promised to update us on project progress as implementation continues. We'll keep you posted.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 and is filed under , , , , , . You can leave a response and follow any responses to this entry through the Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) .

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