Wisconsin Traffic Operations

Although transit or road capacity increases are historically very common subjects of economic analysis, the implementations of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) strategies have been receiving increasing attention as resources for capacity expansion become increasingly scarce. There exists a strong business case for lower cost strategies to more efficiently deliver transportation in ways that do not entail additional costly right-of-way or lane-miles. An example of an increasingly common ITS strategy for managing traffic flow in urban areas is ramp metering, wherein traffic signals placed on freeway on-ramps disperse platoons of vehicles or restrict flow to maintain higher throughput and more stable flow on the freeway.