Impacts of Transportation System Operations Strategies during Non-Recurring Events: Lessons Learned from a Virginia Case Study

Transportation systems across the nation are significantly impacted by non-recurring events like incidents, workzones and weather, on a daily basis. To mitigate these impacts, State and local transportation agencies have been increasingly implementing operations strategies such as traffic incident management, coordinated workzone road closure, weather treatments, and traveler information. To better understand the impacts of these events and the operations strategies, and hence better manage the strategies themselves, the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) recently completed a research project. The project analyzed select incidents, workzones and weather events in detail, realizing the new opportunities presented by the emerging crowd-sourced traffic speed data. Several performance measures were calculated and presented in tabular form and through visualizations. Major lessons learned during this project are presented as challenges and applied solutions under these five topics: benchmark selection, data and calculation methodology, visualization, data quality, and diversity of measures.