Evaluation of the US 290 Changeable Lane Assignment System for Incident Management (7-2910-2)

The principal goal of this project was to evaluate the operational effectiveness of the CLAS system as an incident management tool to optimize incident management operations in the US 290 Corridor. During incident management, the CLAS system provides for shared turn lane assignments and incident management signal timings at the intersections affected by the freeway mainlane incident. The incident management signal timing plans were developed as part of this project to provide time management by balancing the need to progress additional traffic along the westbound US 290 frontage road with the need to minimize delay along the corridor.|Candidate incidents were documented by the video data collection system and reviewed to assess the impact of incidents on freeway and frontage road operations. Seven incidents (1 AM, 3 mid-day, and 3 PM) were evaluated using FREQ 11 to model freeway operations and Synchro to model frontage road operations. Comparisons were made between results for the actual incident conditions with simulated CLAS incident management conditions. Results indicated a reduction in total (freeway and frontage road network) delay for the three mid-day and three PM peak period incidents analyzed but resulted in increased total network delay during the one AM peak period incident analyzed. Other study measures of effectiveness documented in this report include delay per vehicle, frontage road and cross street levels of service, throughput, and lane use violations.