Active Transportation and Demand Management Analytical Methods for Urban Streets

This report describes an investigation of analytical, Highway Capacity Manual (HCM)-compatible evaluation methods for urban street active transportation and demand management (ATDM). ATDM strategies have been successfully deployed in the United States, but the lack of available analytical methods may be reducing their successful adoption by more cities. To achieve the full benefits of ATDM, it is essential that the user community of traffic engineers and planners, and the policy decision makers they support, have ready tools to evaluate the benefits and operational impacts of specific projects. Accordingly, the HCM provides an ideal vehicle to disseminate these capabilities at a level of analysis that most engineers and planners are familiar and comfortable with. Due to the scarcity of field data, conclusions developed during this project were based on software experiments. This effort produced a detailed set of ranges and conditions under which dynamic lane grouping (DLG) could be effective. Additionally, this effort illustrated the potential benefits of three ATDM strategies, and demonstrated HCM implementation of two ATDM strategies. It was originally believed that the ATDM strategies could be effectively modeled via capacity adjustment factors, similar to what was accomplished during the freeway ATDM project. However, it was later discovered that the capacity adjustment paradigm would be unsuitable for arterials, and that the HCM reliability framework would offer a preferable solution. Specifically, the alternative lane use configurations could be modeled as special event datasets, along with re-optimized timing plans for the new lane uses. Case studies then demonstrated this concept. The full report is available online at https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop16088/fhwahop16088.pdf