Improving Traffic Flow at Long-term Roadworks

Long-term roadworks on highways are vital as part of roadway and bridge renovations. They generate bottlenecks and can consequently cause congestion and accidents. If the number of lanes is reduced, this will lead to a significant decrease in capacity. Even if all lanes can be kept operational, narrower lanes and roadway switching will reduce the capacity. Intelligent solutions to support the traffic flow at longterm roadworks therefore need to be evaluated.

The “Traffic Change” (TC) system was developed for this purpose. This system enables lanes to be dynamically assigned to the roadway with the higher demand. It can be applied in the case of bridge maintenance, road resurfacing and repair (entire roadway), tunnel renovation with two-way traffic in the operational bore, or temporary adaption of the number of operational lanes, depending on the traffic demand. In this way, the work space needed for roadworks can be enlarged.

Thus TC has beneficial effects on capacity and thus on traffic flow when the number of traffic lanes is reduced in roadworks. Even if all traffic lanes are kept operational during the roadworks, TC provides several advantages concerning road- and bridgeworks operation and costs.

The TC concept leads to improved traffic safety and optimized traffic flow at roadworks, as well as shorter interruptions and lower costs. Finally, using TC at roadworks will result in major cost savings that can be computed using the “Traffic Change Simulation” tool (TC-Sim).