Road Weather Management Program
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Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Title:

Benefit Assessment of Implementing Weather-Specific Signal Timing Plans using CORSIM

Abstract:

Data availability and powerful traffic simulation tools make it possible for engineers to develop and assess weather-specific traffic operations strategies to mitigate congestion in bad weather. CORSIM (a microscopic traffic simulation model) was used to illustrate a procedure of assessing benefits of retiming traffic signals in bad weather for both principal arterials and regional networks. The simulation results show that in general, the lower the average speed the higher the benefits realized. For example, when speed is 10 mph, delay reduction or time savings can be 1.2 minutes per mile. However, if the average speed in bad weather without retiming signals is below 7 mph or higher than 25 mph, there is no benefit of retiming signals (7 mph is a critical point where gridlock occurs and the system starts breaking down regardless of the timing plan). Some preliminary findings and gaps identified for further research are also provided.

Source(s):

83rd Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting; FHWA Office of Operations Research and Development and ITT Industries. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2004

Author:

Lieu, Lin

Keywords:


Capacity
Traffic signal
Speed
Traffic modeling
Precipitation
Visibility
Snow
Ice/Frost

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