Transportation Programming for Identifying Optimal Locations for Creating New Lanes by Reducing Lane and Shoulder Width.

Growing congestion and increasing funding gaps have forced state departments of transportation (DOTs) to look for cost-effective transportation solutions. Throughout the U.S., there is an increasing realization that there are valuable benefits to using the existing roadway facilities to their full potential. Innovative road space management strategies like narrowing of multiple lanes (three or more) and shoulder width to add a lane enhances the utilization while eliminating the costs associated with constructing new lanes. Although this strategy generally leads to better mobility, the narrow lanes may affect safety. Further, there is a likelihood that added capacity may provide localized benefits, at the expense of system level performance measures (average travel time and crashes) because of relocation of traffic operational bottlenecks. This paper develops a novel method to identify optimal corridors for reducing lane and shoulder width to add a new lane in the network. The methodology explicitly takes into consideration the system level benefits and safety. A large city network is solved to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB65 Operational Effects of Geometrics.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Sharma, Sushant
• 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; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 19p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Highway corridors; Highway safety; Programming (Planning); Road shoulders; Traffic lanes; Width
• Uncontrolled Terms: Space management
• Subject Areas: Design; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01559864
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-4772
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Apr 6 2015 7:17PM