Mobility Impacts of Ramp Metering Operations on Freeways

Abstract

Transportation agencies are implementing traffic management strategies to improve mobility and safety on freeways. Ramp metering is a traffic management strategy deployed to mitigate congestion on freeways by using traffic signals installed at on-ramps to control and regulate vehicle entry onto the freeway mainline. Estimating the mobility benefits of ramp metering is critical not only to determine the strategy’s effectiveness but also to inform the decision-making process regarding its deployment. The before-and-after approach and ramp metering shutdown experiments are conventional methods for estimating the benefits of ramp metering. These methods could overestimate or underestimate the benefits. This study aimed to estimate the expected mobility benefits of ramp metering by leveraging ramp metering downtime due to system breakdowns. Buffer index (BI), a travel time reliability measure, was selected as the performance measure. The study was based on data collected from 2016 to 2018 on a corridor with ramp metering signals (RMSs) along I-95 in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Penalized regression methods were used to identify factors that could predict the buffer indices of the freeway segment with RMSs. Factors evaluated include ramp metering operations (on/off), freeway traffic congestion levels, freeway mainline traffic speed, ramp traffic volume, and density of on-ramps and off-ramps. Results showed a 23% reduction in BIs during moderate congestion and a 28% reduction in BIs during severe congestion. Transportation agencies could use the results when evaluating RMSs operational performance and comparing their mobility impact with other alternatives.