Improving Work Zone Mobility Through Planning, Design, and Operations

This research project consists of a series of tasks intended to yield results that will better inform transportation agencies in their planning, design, and operations of freeway work zones. This report is comprised of four parts reflecting the work of the four institutions involved. First, a traffic simulation model of a freeway lane closure was developed and calibrated. This part of the research also addressed the validity of default parameters in Vissim for time headway and truck acceleration capabilities. Additionally, a stochastic approach to evaluating freeway work zone capacity was proposed and a test case developed. The second part of this report documents an effort to evaluate the effects of early merge and late merge scenarios across a range of freeway lane closure and traffic volume cases. The third part describes the use of video images to identify driver behavior patterns at freeway work zones across a range of traffic conditions and roadway geometric configurations. The fourth part describes mesoscopic traffic modeling of freeway work zones and how the results affected work zone operations to mitigate congestion. The report as a whole addresses many aspects of freeway work zones, including traffic simulation modeling and adjustment to several default model parameters, a simulation experiment comparing early and late merge scenarios, the use of video images processing to support modeling of driver behavior parameters, and a summary of other related work.