Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency
Home MenuManaging Congestion
NOACA staff is working to establish policies concerning congestion management; specifically defining acceptable levels of congestion and prioritizing congestion mitigation strategies.
Sources of Congestion Include:
- Too much traffic for the available physical capacity to handle
- Traffic incidents
- Work zones
- Bad weather
- Special events
- Poorly timed traffic signals
Congestion Mitigation Strategies Include:
- Add capacity to the transportation system:
- Add capacity to the transit system
- High occupancy vehicle (HOV)/High occupancy too (HOT) lanes
- Increasing capacity of non-freeway corridors
- Increasing intercity freight rail capacity to reduce truck use of highways
- Remove bottleneck
- Operate existing capacity more efficiently:
- Enhance Access management
- Anticipate and address special events that cause surges in traffic
- Enhance freight management
- Convert streets to one-way operations
- Faster and anticipatory responses to traffic incidents
- Geometric improvements to roads and intersections
- Identify weather and road surface problems
- Improve management of work zones
- Increase efficiency of interchanges
- Increase transit accessibility
- Optimize the timing of traffic signals
- Provide travelers with information on travel conditions
- Provide real-time information on transit schedules and arrivals
- Regulate the flow of traffic entering freeways (metering traffic onto freeways)
- Restrict turns at key intersections
- Encourage congestion reducing strategies:
- Encourage non-motorized commuting
- Encourage flexible work hours
- Encourage transit use
- Encourage ridesharing
- Encourage telecommuting
Learn More: