http://tags.library.upenn.edu/tag/city_planning+fhwa PennTags Feed http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/24526 http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/24526 <h3>Is congestion the same everywhere?</h3> <p>Highway congestion, very simply, is caused when traffic demand approaches or exceeds the available capacity of the highway system. Though this concept is easy to understand, congestion can vary significantly from day to day because traffic demand and available highway capacity are constantly changing. Traffic demands vary significantly by time of day, day of the week, and season of the year, and are also subject to significant fluctuations due to recreational travel, special events, and emergencies (e.g. evacuations). Available highway capacity, which is often viewed as being fixed, also varies constantly, being frequently reduced by incidents (e.g. crashes and disabled vehicles), work zones, adverse weather, and other causes.</p> <p>To add even more complexity, the definition of highway congestion also varies significantly from time to time and place to place based on user expectations. An intersection that may seem very congested in a rural community may not even register as an annoyance in a large metropolitan area. A level of congestion that users expect during peak commute periods may be unacceptable if experienced on Sunday morning. Because of this, congestion is difficult to define precisely in a mathematical sense &ndash; it actually represents the difference between the highway system performance that users expect and how the system actually performs.</p> <p>Congestion can also be measured in a number of ways &ndash; level of service, speed, travel time, and delay are commonly used measures. However, travelers have indicated that more important than the severity, magnitude, or quantity of congestion is the reliability of the highway system. People in a large metropolitan area may accept that a 20 mile freeway trip takes 40 minutes during the peak period, so long as this predicted travel time is reliable and is not 25 minutes one day and 2 hours the next. This focus on reliability is particularly prevalent in the freight community, where the value of time under certain just-in-time delivery circumstances may exceed $5 per minute.</p>