Develop Annual Arterial Congestion Report

Project summary:

Since 1993, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) has prepared an annual Metro Freeway System Congestion Report that documents congested segments of the freeway system. The report not only measures freeway system performance but also helps MnDOT identify freeway segments that are over capacity, and prioritize and allocate the available resources for project planning. However, a similar congestion report for the arterial system has not been developed, although signalized arterial roads carry a large percentage of traffic in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. This is primarily due to the lack of a way to automatically collect traffic signal data and measure performance. In this project--based on the archived high-resolution traffic data from four major arterials equipped with the SMART-Signal system in the metro area (i.e., Trunk Highway 13, Trunk Highway 55, Trunk Highway 7 and Trunk Highway 10)--researchers developed an innovative approach to generate an arterial traffic congestion report for the MnDOT Metro District. Results show that the main approaches of the four signalized corridors operate very efficiently during a.m. and p.m. peaks, but larger delays happen at side streets in general.