Introduction to Traffic Management

Traffic management concerns the guidance and control of all types of vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists with the goal of providing a safe and efficient movements of people and goods. Road based traffic management can be broadly categorized under arterial roads management, freeway management, incident management, and parking management. Many diverse users share a limited road space in urban areas. The orderly and safe movement of traffic on arterial roads are attributed to good design of uncontrolled intersection (e.g., turbo roundabout), coordinated traffic signal control and designated lanes for public transport and cyclists. Freeways are high-capacity high-speed roads designed to carry high traffic volume between urban centers. Freeways are crucial in the functioning of cities. Often freeway capacity is degraded, for example through the development of bottlenecks, resulting in congestion and reduced mobility. Ramp metering and variable speed limit (VSL) are some of the controls used to regulate traffic entering freeways and to reduce vehicle speed approaching stationary queues. Air traffic management in broad term includes services provided to an aircraft during the flight, measures applied to reduce demand temporarily when demand exceeds capacity and airspace management. Similarly, port management concerns the strategic decision-making, monitoring and controlling of ports and terminals.

The articles in this section present a range of view across topics. Topics covered include common traffic phenomena such as capacity drop, flow breakdown, and recurrent and nonrecurrent congestion. Arterial traffic management such as signal coordination, permitted and permissive phases, hook turns, signalized roundabout, turbo roundabouts, and emergency vehicle priority. Public transport aspects such as adaptive bus control, transit priority, railway crossing, and tram lane configurations and driving rules. Articles on freeway management included city wide coordinated ramp meters, VSL, hard shoulder running, reversible lane, high occupancy vehicles lanes, and high occupancy toll lanes. Incidents contribute to a significant amount of road congestion and their impact can be mitigated by early detection and quick incident clearance. For this aspect, topics covered included incident detection technologies and incident management. Active transport such as bicycle sharing, and real time information systems such as parking information systems and advance travelers information systems are covered. Besides hardware control, road pricing as an economic mechanism to include externalities cost to reduce excess demand, and free flow electronic toll collection are covered. Non-road-based transport such as air traffic management and port management are also included.