Evaluation of Metro Freeway System for Reliability and Resilience Status: CompleteReport Date: 03/14/2022 Summary: Providing consistent freeway travel times for Twin Cities area drivers requires careful traffic management and well-planned freeway projects. To effectively respond to incidents and identify the most needed renovations, MnDOT traffic managers need to know precisely where, when and why congestion is happening. New research provides a software tool to understand congestion and its causes on freeway corridors in the metro area. Expanding on previous work, investigators developed comprehensive enhancements for a tool that estimates travel-time reliability—how consistent or dependable travel times are on a specific stretch of highway during a given time of day. With the construction of an extensive database of historical travel conditions and driving times, they calculated several new measures to understand travel-time reliability and the factors that impact freeway congestion, such as weather, work zones and highway geometry. They analyzed conditions on 48 freeway routes and started exploring a measure of the operational resilience of a highway corridor, which refers to the capability of the corridor to adapt and recover from disturbances that lead to congestion. Final Deliverables: Report #2022-01 Appendix #2022-01A Research Summary Related Materials: Making Freeway Travel Times in the Twin Cities Area More Reliable - (Blog Post) MnDOT studying ways to bring congestion relief for drivers - (News/Publication Article) Related Research:
