TITLE:
Comparative Analysis and Assessment of States’ Traffic Management Center Programs
AUTHORS:
Ardeshir Faghri, Michael L. Vaughan, Abebaw Berihun
KEYWORDS:
Transportation Management Center, Comparison, Evaluation, Data Collection, Case Study
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Transportation Technologies,
Vol.11 No.2,
April
22,
2021
ABSTRACT: This research presents a step-by-step guideline for
traffic data collection standards set by the Institute of Transportation
Engineers (ITE) and American Association of State Highway and Transportation
Officials (AASHTO). This study reviews manual and automatic methods of traffic
counting and provides detailed information on traffic volume and vehicle
classification studies. This research also provides a detailed analysis of the
Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT)-TMC (Transportation Management
Center) websites and compares it to selected Department of Transportation
websites of other states such as Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, California, Texas, and Virginia. The purpose of the comparison is
to analyze the data sources; user
friendliness, accessibility, types of data available, presentation formats, and
style for each state to determine how they compared to DelDOT-TMC. Although there were some similarities,
the findings suggest that two major differences are present. The overall
results revealed that DelDOT-TMC provides limited traffic and roadway weather
data, and presentation formats to the public as compared to the other states.
Further, a unitless variable, called the Capacity Factor (Q), has been
developed within this study to represent this
relative comparison. This study shows that DelDOT TMC performs well within the group of selected states
and better than selected states of
similar size and most selected states of larger size; where only Virginia performs better then DelDOT TMC. DelDOT TMC does not perform as well as selected neighboring states; however, it
performs in an acceptable range relative to neighboring states.