Work Zone Designer Series – Traffic Diversion for Work Zone Traffic Management

Most State and many other transportation departments in the U.S. maintain roadway and/or work zone design manuals containing State specific regulations, policies, and design guidance for their designers and consultants to use to prepare their project work zone transportation management plans. Those manuals vary widely in the depth of coverage and the work zone design topics offered. This document is in a series of publications for work zone design manual decision makers, editors, and subject matter experts to develop or enhance their own guidance materials on the topic of traffic diversions as a traffic management technique when preparing work zone traffic management plans.

“Traffic Diversion for Work Zone Traffic Management” provides information on different types of diversion
techniques and purposes for each type, factors used to decide diversion locations, using voluntary/optional diversion as a mitigation treatment, and using smart work zone technology tools to increase voluntary diversions. This publication is not intended to be a stand-alone document for designing work zone traffic control plans. State, county, local, and tribal transportation agency subject matter experts, can use this material as reference material to augment their own work zone transportation management planning manuals and guidance materials, and work zone design policies and procedures.

The material has been gathered from existing State design manuals, considered as noteworthy state-of-the-practices by the authors and worthy of sharing with other states, and from state-of-the-art work zone safety and traffic management research documents developed by the FHWA and other transportation research institutions. Many of these documents are available in the National Work Zone Safety Information Clearinghouse.