General Guidelines for Active Traffic Management Deployment

Continued growth in travel in congested freeway corridors and limited public funding for expansion and improvement projects are limiting agencies’ abilities to provide sufficient roadway capacity in major metropolitan areas. Focusing on trip reliability, active traffic management (ATM)—widely deployed for decades in Europe but in its early stages in the United States—maximizes the effectiveness and efficiency of the facility, and increases throughput and safety through integrated systems with new technology, including the automation of dynamic deployment to optimize performance quickly. This congestion management approach consists of a combination of strategies that, when implemented in concert, fully optimize the existing infrastructure and provide measurable benefits to the transportation network and the motoring public. These strategies include speed harmonization, temporary shoulder use, junction control, and dynamic signing and re-routing. By providing transportation agencies across the United States with crucial information on best practices for deployment and operation of ATM strategies, this project can have a positive impact on transportation networks where ATM is deployed. This document provides an overview of practices to date in ATM deployment as well as general guidelines that can help facilitate ATM implementation.