Exploring the impact of a coordinated variable speed limit control on congestion distribution in freeway

Over the past few decades, urban freeway congestion has been highly recognized as a serious and worsening traffic problem in the world. To relieve freeway congestion, several active traffic and demand management （ATDM） methods have been developed. Among them, variable speed limit （VSL） aims at regulating freeway mainline flow upstream to meet existing capacity and to harmonize vehicle speed. However, congestion may still be inevitable even with VSL implemented due to extremely high demand in actual practice. This study modified an existing VSL strategy by adding a new local constraint to suggest an achievable speed limit during the control period. As a queue is a product of the congestion phenomenon in freeway, the incentives of a queue build-up in the applied coordinated VSL control situation were analyzed. Considering a congestion occurrence （a queue build-up） characterized by a sudden and sharp speed drop, speed contours were utilized to demonstrate the congestion distribution over a whole freeway network in various sce- narios. Finally, congestion distributions found in both VSL control and non-VS control situations for various scenarios were investigated to explore the impact of the applied coordinated VSL control on the congestion distribution. An authentic stretch of V^hitemud Drive （I~~ID）, an urban freeway corridor in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, was employed to implement this modified coordinated VSL control strategy; and a calibrated micro-simu- lation VISSIM model （model functions） was applied as the substitute of the real-world traffic system to test the above mentioned performance. The exploration task in this study can lay the groundwork for future research on how to improve the presented VSL control strategy for achieving the congestion mitigation effect on freeway.

Travel time reliability with and without the dynamic use of hard shoulder:Field assessment from a French motorway

Traffic management aims to ensure a high quality of service for most users by decreasing congestion and increasing safety. However, uncertainty regarding travel time decreases the quality of service and leads end-users to change their routes and schedules even when the average travel time is low, Indicators describing travel time reliability are being developed and should be used in the future both for the optimization and the assessment of active traffic management operation. This paper describes a managed lane experience on a motorway weaving section in France - hard shoulder running operation in rush hours. The paper is focused on travel time reliability indicators and their use for reliability assessment. It provides some discussions about the advantages and drawbacks of reliability indicators under different traffic conditions. It particularly shows the difference between using buffer times and buffer indexes. The paper also discusses the difficulty of interpreting the skew of travel time distribution for travel reliability,