3.0 Role of Traffic Analysis Tools

Traffic analysis tools are designed to assist transportation professionals in evaluating the strategies that best address the transportation needs of their jurisdiction. Specifically, traffic analysis tools can help practitioners:

• Improve the decisionmaking process. Traffic analysis tools help practitioners arrive at better planning/engineering decisions for complex transportation problems. They are used to estimate the impact of the deployment of traffic management and other strategies, and to help set priorities among competing projects. In addition, they can provide a consistent approach for comparing potential improvements or alternatives.
• Evaluate and prioritize planning/operational alternatives. This typically involves comparing “no build” conditions with alternatives, which include various types of potential improvements. The impacts are reported as performance measures and are defined as the difference between the no-build and alternative scenarios. The results can be used to select the best alternative or prioritize improvements, increasing the odds of having a successful deployment.
• Improve design and evaluation time and costs. Traffic analysis tools are relatively less costly when compared to pilot studies, field experiments, or full implementation costs. Furthermore, analytical tools can be used to assess multiple deployment combinations or other complex scenarios in a relatively short time.
• Reduce disruptions to traffic. Traffic management and control strategies come in many forms and options, and analytical tools provide a way to cheaply estimate the effects prior to full deployment of the management strategy. They may be used to initially test new transportation management systems concepts without the inconvenience of a field experiment.
• Present/market strategies to the public/stakeholders. Some traffic analysis tools have excellent graphical and animation displays, which could be used as tools to show “what if” scenarios to the public and/or stakeholders.
• Operate and manage existing roadway capacity. Some tools provide optimization capabilities, recommending the best design or control strategies to maximize the performance of a transportation facility.
• Monitor performance. Analytical tools can also be used to evaluate and monitor the performance of existing transportation facilities. In the future, it is hoped that monitoring systems can be directly linked to analytical tools for a more direct and real-time analysis process.

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