Congestion, the Thief of Time

Mike Ostrom gives an insight into some of the innovative tools that allow road users to claw back the valuable time wasted due to traffic congestion.

It is often said that procrastination is the thief of time. No less can be said of the effect of traffic congestion on our hectic modern lifestyles. Time to do the things that interest us, time with our families and friends is the most precious resource. Almost no one disagrees that time is money. Conversely, money can also buy us time: you can hire someone to clean your house, mow your lawn or deliver your dry-cleaning. However, time is not a renewable resource, once squandered it can never be replaced. According to the 2009 Urban Mobility Report, due to ever increasing traffic congestion, we spent an extra 4.2 billion hours in our vehicles, expended an additional 2.8 billion gallons of fuel, costing us the incredible sum of $87.2 billion.

Since we cannot create time, how do we buy back the time lost due to traffic delay? The modest declines in traffic volumes due to increases in fuel prices and a slowed economy certainly haven't made much of an effect and are not sustainable. Longer-term strategies such as increasing urban density or building a nationwide high-speed rail system, though promising, do little for us in the short-term. Immediate, lower-cost programs that reduce congestion without adding new roadways such as high-occupancy lanes, better traffic signalization, improved traveler information and incident response systems are things we can do today. These programs do work. The Federal Highway Administration's Highway Performance Monitoring System shows that in 2007 we bought back 308 million hours, reduced our fuel needs by 202 million gallons and saved $6.5 billion. As effective as these programs are, we can do better.

Intelligent Intersections is an interesting recent example of this. InSync, developed by Rhythm Engineering, is a system that uses cameras to detect vehicles in and approaching intersections and changes the timing accordingly. Systems at consecutive intersections co-ordinate in real-time so most vehicles can move through without stopping. A recent study of InSync by Midwest Research Institute for Missouri Department of Transportation, determined significant benefits including a 90 percent reduction in stops, travel time improvements of 30 percent, fuel consumption reductions of 20 percent and emissions savings of 30 percent.

Improved portable navigation devices and location aware smart phones are also effective at reducing travel times. According to a recent report by NuStats, using a traffic enabled GPS navigation device reduced user travel times by 21 percent. As predictive traffic information becomes more widely available, the effectiveness of these devices should increase even further.

Perhaps the most promising of these new technologies are dynamic Traffic Management Systems (TMS). These proactive systems use advanced simulation models combined with real-time traffic and origin/destination information to predict the effects of various management strategies. This allows more effective management and provides better traveler information that until now was not possible. New technology from Mygistics, Inc. combines route choice, travel time and departure time data collected from several real-time sources such as loop detectors, roadside sensors and GPS-equipped probe vehicles. This information is then used, along with demand-based simulation models, to predict network flow patterns. The model can consider any combination of management strategies such as incident management, ramp metering, signal control and traveler information to produce optimal strategies. Travel time predictions and route recommendations can then be made available to travelers.

Improving the livability of our communities by giving back the valuable time that is taken from us every day in traffic delay should be our near term focus. These innovative tools that allow us to more effectively take advantage of the large amount of unused roadway network capacity will allow us to be green, save green, and maybe even have a little more time to spend on the green.

Mike Ostrom is a cofounder of Mygistics and an expert in the fields of Transportation Technology, Geospatial Information, Visualization/Simulation, and the production of Predictive Traffic and Travel Time Data. As the current CEO of Mygistics he is working to combine the latest in Web 2.0 technologies with Traffic Engineering and Intelligent Transportation Systems to improve mobility on a national scale.