Arterial streets are a critical location of travel delays in urban transportation systems. This project focuses on the analytical and predictive approaches for quantifying reliability performance of arterial streets to enable incorporation of travel time reliability into arterial planning and management in North Carolina. A series of analyses on the sources of arterial unreliability is presented which also critically examines the differences in data sources available on North Carolina arterials. Two NCDOT arterial analysis tools were updated to allow for planning-level arterial reliability analysis and prioritization of traffic signal retiming in the state.
The analyses presented in this report may be repeated by NCDOT staff using a number of sources and platforms available to NCDOT including NCDOT's SPM tool and Retiming tool, RITIS Probe Data Analytics, ClearGuide, and FHWA's National Performance Management Data Research Data Set. Utilization of the ARTVAL tool will enable planning-level HCM arterial reliability analysis of corridors with a limited data requirement. The utilization of the analyses and tools developed in this project will allow NCDOT to include travel time reliability in planning, managing and improving arterials in the state and measure the additional benefits to the public from these programs.
