Improving incident management through traffic diversion to frontage roads and parallel routes

The Urban Mobility Report shows that 56% of all travel delay in Austin, TX is caused by incidents. This report investigates methods to manage traffic congestion due to incidents on northbound Interstate Highway 35 during the A.M. peak. Specifically, a portion of the traffic exiting the freeway is diverted to a parallel route, Congress Avenue. The amount of traffic diverted is controlled by signal timings that allow a select number of vehicles to turn left and travel onto Congress Avenue. The quantity of traffic diverted is dictated by the limiting capacity on the diversion route and the amount of acceptable delay due to the signal retiming at the diversion intersection. CORSIM was used to simulate three different incident scenarios and PASSER II was used to provide maximum progression in the direction of the diversion.