Penalty for failing to promptly open lanes beyond the lane closure limit

New York calculates user delay costs on a project-by-project basis to determine the appropriate liquidated damage or lane rental amount for failure to return lanes to full service. They use an in-house program called “The Highway User Cost Accounting” computer program to help determine these values. The primary sources of information in this application come from the “1994 Highway Capacity Manual,” the 1977 AASHTO publication “A Manual of User Benefit Analysis of Highway and Bus-Transit Improvement,” the 1982 ITE “Traffic and Transportation Engineering Handbook,” as well as cost accounting methods used by the department in its upstate urban traffic simulation package. New York has also evaluated the use of QuickZone to calculate user delay.