THE SOUTHEASTERN WISCONSIN FREEWAY SYSTEM OPERATIONAL ASSESSMENT PROCESS: INTEGRATING FREEWAY SYSTEM MANAGEMENT AND PERFORMANCE-BASED DECISION SUPPORT

In Southeastern Wisconsin, the Freeway System Operational Assessment (FSOA) process is being developed and applied to support decisions about operational strategies and geometric improvements on approximately two hundred centerline miles of the regional freeway system. This freeway system is entering a period of major reconstruction and is prominent within a tri-state Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) priority corridor. FSOA is an interorganizational decision-making and resource management process. This process fills gaps that typically exist between regional transportation planning, transportation improvement project development, and daily transportation system management. The process also ensures that operational performance measures are integrated with pavement and bridge conditions to define and scope specific segmental transportation improvement projects. FSOA incorporates and analytical and data management tool set integrated through a geographic information system (GIS). The FSOA GIS accommodates traffic modeling and other analytical tools to generate freeway system operational measures such as travel delay and speed. FSOA also considers emerging measures of travel variability and acceptability. The FSOA approach enables system-level traffic operational analysis, moving beyond isolated segmental or interchange area analyses. This approach also accommodates evaluation of comprehensive alternative systematic strategies to maximize objective operational performance measures. These alternative systemic strategies can integrate various blends of major and minor geometric improvements, as well as ITS deployments and other operational improvements. FSOA comparatively evaluates these alternative blends under existing and multiple future scenarios. FSOA also supports ongoing refinement of adopted operational strategies such as freeway traffic management systems and traffic incident management program elements.