TRAFFIC OPERATIONS PROGRAM TO INCREASE CAPACITY AND SAFETY

The concentration of people in U.S. urban areas and increased vehicular ownership have greatly affected residential patterns and have brought about wanted and unwanted consequences. One of the most noticeable of these changes has been the increase in mobility of the population, with a resulting increase in traffic demands and corresponding increased congestion of city streets and highways. In an attempt to help mitigate these problems, the U.S. Congress established a program known as TOPICs (Traffic Operations Programs to Increase Capacity and Safety) in the 1968 Federal-Aid Highway Act. This article provides an overview of the TOPICs program, which is designed to get more efficiency from existing city arterial networks by a systematic application of traffic operational types of improvements. These improvements must be based on an areawide plan which includes prioritization of goals. TOPICs does not include major construction except to eliminate point bottlenecks where constricted operations prevent full use of existing capacity along the remainder of a route.