AASHTO Asset Management Task Force s3

NCHRP 20-7 Proposed Research Needs Statement AHB25 Traffic Signal Systems Committee Peter Koonce, City of Portland, Chair of the TRB AHB25 TSSC Aleksandar Stevanovic, AHB25 Research Coordinator Mike Holder, Chair, AASHTO SCOTE Mark Luszcz, Chair, AASHTO SCOTE Signals/Lighting Task Force 04/18/2017

TITLE Benefits of Adaptive Traffic Control Deployments – A Review of Evaluation Studies

BACKGROUND / NEEDS STATEMENT Adaptive Traffic Control Systems (ATCS), have been in use since late ‘70s but received significant attention in the US only few years ago. Since 2008, when the previous NCHRP synthesis study on ATCSs was commissioned (NCHRP Synthesis of Highway Practice, Project 20-5: Synthesis Topic 40-03), the number of these systems has increased by more than 600%. Although there are more than 150 deployments across the country, there are still a number of questions that remained unanswered about operational and safety benefits of these systems. Intelligent Transportation Systems engineers and traffic signals practitioners are very interested to find out what type of benefits (and their magnitude) can be expected from ATCS deployments. Most of the recent studies on ATCS topics mainly describe characteristics of existing systems, subjective users’ opinions, requirements for system deployments, etc. The literature review clearly shows a shortage of comprehensive studies which would gather data from numerous field evaluations, categorize those evaluations based on a number of criteria, summarize findings, and develop meaningful conclusions.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE To address these issues, a goal of this study is to document operational and safety benefits of various ATCS deployments. The proposed study should include brief descriptions of available commercial ATCS (including few new technologies that emerged in the last few years) with their operational requirements (e.g. communications, detection, hardware, and software). The main emphasis should be given to various ATCS evaluations and their characteristics, including:

• Type and size of the network/corridor (commuter vs. recreational route, linear vs. grid network, small vs. large network, etc.) • Presence of multimodal operations (level of pedestrian activity (school zones), number of public transportation lines and bus stops, transit priority and preemption, etc.) • Type of performance measures collected (travel time, delay, number of stops, etc.) • Type of data collection methodology and technology (floating car data, point-to-point travel time measurements, intersection delay studies, GPS, Bluetooth/Wi-Fi MAC readers, microwave radars, etc.) used in the evaluation study • Time of data collection (peak vs. off peak season, AM, MD and PM peaks, weekends, special traffic events, incidents, etc.) • Features of adaptive systems - detection (location, type, etc.), responsiveness, operational scope, etc. • Other relevant operational conditions (the above list is not inclusive; the study should define all other relevant factors and categorize evaluation studies based on such factors). The data collected in the study should be provided both in hardcopy and electronic database format (e.g. spreadsheet or freely available online database (e.g. within NOCoE website)). In this way decision makers and practitioners could filter through evaluation studies to find ones which reflect their specific operational conditions. In this way, only relevant studies can be taken in consideration when estimating operational and safety benefits of specific ATCS deployment. A previous synthesis study (NCHRP Synthesis of Highway Practice, Project 20-5: Synthesis Topic 40-03) on similar topic provided a comprehensive review of the technologies and users’ opinions but did not synthesize results from field evaluations and it did not correlate such results with a number of deploying factors and criteria.

WORK TASKS Tasks anticipated in this project include the following:  Collect necessary data from various agencies (survey) and available literature  Synthesize data into appropriate forms to emphasize various types of ATCS evaluations and their characteristics  Summarize findings and develop meaningful conclusions about where and when ATCS bring most benefits  Create spreadsheet or an online tool that could be used to retrieve available data and help decision makers investigate implementations similar to their cases  Develop and submit final report

URGENCY High urgency. Many traffic signal agencies expect a follow-up study after recent boom in number of ATCS deployments in various operational, safety, and land-use environments.

FUNDING REQUESTED AND TIME REQUIRED It is estimated that this research will take 11-12 months to complete and will require $99,000.

CONTACT PERSON Aleksandar Stevanovic, Ph.D., P.E. Assoc. Prof. of Civil, Environ. & Geom. Engineering Director, LATOM Lab for Adaptive Traffic Operations & Management http://latom.eng.fau.edu

Florida Atlantic University 777 Glades Road, Bldg. 36, Rm. 225 Boca Raton, FL 33431 Phone: 561 297 3743 Mobile: 801 671 2868 e-mail: [email protected]