Traffic Management of the Congested Urban-suburban Arterial Roads

Abstract

Managing the congestion is an old and legitimate claim of the cities. However, in spite of the promising solutions, the use of passenger cars outside the city centers did not decrease. The still hot topic requires a real solution.The goal of the traffic planning and management was to serve the traffic demands but with the increase in traffic, infrastructure development could not keep up, so this goal - theoretically - is not valid anymore. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift: the old goals are obviously not working, but new goals and the tools needed to achieve them have not yet been developed.According to the presented research, the operation of urban-suburban rush hour congestion radically differs from the way we have assumed so far, so a new framework was developed that describes this traffic operation. This framework allows us to look for new and valid management solutions and set new strategic and operational goals. In this paper, it is proposed not to build infrastructure for traffic demands, but to adapt the traffic demands to the infrastructure, by creating the optimal saturated traffic flow. This will prevent negative traffic dynamics and impacts on the network and provide higher quality and a more reliable road network operation. The research results have led us to theoretical questions such as the right of the limitation of the free routing on the road network.