E – 1621 Mitigating Traffic Congestion through Managing Demand

Description

This online engineering PDH course articulates a framework for managing demand to improve the performance and ef¬ficiency of transportation systems. The framework consists of three elements: demand-side strategies, travel choices, and application settings. An illustration of the framework might be a large urban hospital (the application setting) which causes traffic congestion when employees’ work shift ends. Introduction of flextime for the employees (a demand-side strategy) would cause employees to alter their travel departure times (affect their travel choices), thus lessening congestion. The course describes dozens of strategies and shows how they can affect a wide array of travel choices in many different application settings. Numerous real-life examples are given.

This course is based on the Federal Highway Administration document, “Mitigating Traffic Congestion, The Role of Demand-Side Strategies” written by The Association for Commuter Transportation, et al, in partnership with the FHWA, October, 2004.

• Demand-side strategies
• Mode choices
• Departure-time choices
• Route choices
• Trip reduction choices
• Origin/destination location choices
• Applications
• Summary of case study experience