Evaluation of a Mobile Highway Management System at Roadwork Zones

Abstract

Road construction and maintenance activities cause traffic congestions and delays and present challenges for ensuring the safety of both motorists and road workers. While urban areas are well-equipped with traffic devices, in the case of highways our chances to collect traffic data and control traffic flows may be limited. Then the use of a temporary Highway Traffic Management System seems to be a suitable solution. Although the impacts of its deployment are addressed by many theoretical studies and demonstrated on traffic simulation models, there are not many references dealing with field tests. We provide results of the practical evaluation of the temporary Highway Management System installed and tested on the main highway in the Czech Republic during the road works period. Before-after analysis of collected traffic data was performed to prove the importance and positive impact of the proposed solution. We demonstrate an over 20% increase in the capacity of the roadwork zone and an almost 30 seconds decrease in average delay for one vehicle Highway administrators can use the results to justify investments into the temporary deployment of mobile traffic management systems.