Construction Alternative Screening with Regional Travel Demand Model

Major roadway construction projects often have multiple construction alternatives representing different trade-offs between construction duration, construction cost, and user delay. A model can be useful to gain insight into traffic operations and delays for each construction alternative. The obvious impact of construction is on the path choice or en-route decisions: travelers will choose a different path to avoid the construction area. But, large-scale construction projects may also impact pre-trip decisions. However, it is not reasonable to assume that travelers will necessarily respond to a construction project in the same manner as a permanent network change, such as the change in the network once the construction is complete. This paper proposes a hybrid application of a regional travel demand model to more reasonably represent traveler behavior during construction. Also, the benefits and limitations of using static assignment to evaluate construction alternatives are described and a process to develop total user costs for each construction alternative is presented. This approach is implemented using the regional travel demand model for Minneapolis / St. Paul to evaluate construction alternatives for a series of related projects on I-35E north of St. Paul. The methods described in this paper are appropriate for initial construction alternative screening activities that may leverage the static assignment results on their own as well as for activities that will represent the construction alternatives in a microsimulation model.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB50 Transportation Planning Applications.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Milkovits, Marty
  • Tempesta, Dan
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 13p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Alternatives analysis; Construction projects; Costs; Microsimulation; Traffic assignment; Travel behavior; Travel demand; Work zone traffic control
• Geographic Terms: Minneapolis (Minnesota); Saint Paul (Minnesota)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; I60: Maintenance; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning; I73: Traffic Control;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01514305
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-0287
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 12 2014 12:33PM