Costs and Benefits of a Road Diet Conversion

The analysis presented here is of a cost benefit evaluation of a road diet conversion, reducing an urban arterial street from two-lanes in each direction to one-lane in each direction with a middle turning lane. Livingston Avenue is located in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and is an oversized arterial corridor accessing the center of the city. The costs include increases in travel time from the capacity reduction. These are modeled with a VISSIM micro-simulation of the street. Safety benefits of road diets are one of the main reasons that these are pursued. Evidence on the safety effect suggests that road diet conversions of arterial streets in urban areas will achieve about a 19% reduction in crashes. The benefits of crash reductions and the costs of increased delay are evaluated based on the value of statistical lives saved versus the cost of travel time. This is done for various different scenarios and includes robustness checks. Results overwhelmingly find benefits exceed costs over a 20 year period.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE20 Transportation Economics.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Noland, Robert B
  • Gao, Dong
  • Gonzales, Eric J
  • Brown, Charles
  • 0009-0001-7884-0929
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Photos; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 26p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Arterial highways; Benefit cost analysis; Highway design; Highway safety; Highway traffic control; Traffic lanes
• Uncontrolled Terms: Road diet
• Geographic Terms: New Jersey
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; I73: Traffic Control;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01555455
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-2346
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 27 2015 10:03AM