Urbanization reflects economic development. However, it leads to traffic congestion, which is considered as a major problem in many urban areas in the United States. An estimated $88 billion is lost in productivity, while an average 99 hours are spent by each American in traffic due to congestion in 2019 alone. Extensive research is conducted every year to find ways to mitigate congestion. While catering to transportation needs is a continuous process, the availability of resources is limited. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is one such concept that could effectively address the core of this problem and also be economically viable at the same time.
 
 Efficient transportation systems are a necessity and any time lost in travel directly leads to congestion. This in turn contributes to variation in travel times that lead to the unreliability of a road link. Hence, extensive efforts are being dedicated to improve the transportation system with ITS technologies like Adaptive Traffic Signals and Variable Speed Limit Signs (VSLS). This paper focuses on investigation and identification of road links most susceptible to travel time unreliability and the implementation of VSLS in mitigating the issue.
 
 The methodology involves identifying road links with high variability in travel times followed by highlighting the road links with high variation in the vehicle speeds from the posted speed limit. The road links are then classified based on the functional class. This is followed by conducting cluster analysis and defining thresholds. The road links percolating through the paradigms are then identified.
 
 Travel time measures representing variability and congestion identified from the past literature synthesis are used in this research. Road link-level travel time data obtained from the Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS) for Mecklenburg County in the State of North Carolina, USA is considered in this research. The raw travel time data at one-minute interval was processed by time-of-the-day and day-of-the-week. Peak hours and off-peak hours were considered to accommodate the temporal effects. Geospatial maps are created to visualize the road links suitable for implementation of the VSLS in Mecklenburg County.
 
 The findings from this research assist in identifying the potential road segments for allocation of VSLS.     

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483534.005

Investigating Road Link-Level Data to Identify Potential Areas for Implementing Variable Speed Limit Signs

ASCE International Conference on Transportation & Development (ICTD 2021) is organized by the Transportation & Development Institute (T&DI) of ASCE to facilitate the exchange of information, knowledge, and best practices among transportation and development practitioners and researchers, public infrastructure owners, policymakers, government engineers and planners, operations managers, and leading academics from around the world.

Paper Proceedings: https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483534 | https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483541

Conference DOI: https://doi.org/10.26226/m.631784867747920012e73503