NDOT District II Dashboard (Performance Monitoring & Measurement System)

Freeway Travel Times: Interactive Dashboard home page dashboard monitors and presents Las Vegas Metropolitan Freeway real time and historical traffic condition through Maps, Daily Peak Speeds, Time of Day Speeds, Average Speed and Congestion Plots from different perspective, as shown in the screenshot below.

Traffic Map

·         Live Traffic Map refreshes itself every minute by the detection data polled from the sensors implemented about 1/3 mile spacing along the freeways;

·         Crash / Construction / Incident information is updated real time by FAST TMC operators;

·         Full screen mode is better used for TMC monitoring or fleet dispatchers;

·         Yesterday or historical traffic can be reviewed by user-defined animation playback;

·         Segment and crash is clickable to show detail information.

 

 Daily Peak Speeds

·         Average, 15th and 85th percentile AM/PM peak speeds are plotted to show the monitored freeway traffic trend of the past two weeks;

·         Freeway performance reliability can easily be observed by the 15th and 85th percentile speed range.

 

Time of Day Speeds

·         Average, 15th and 85th percentile speeds of each 15-minute slice during the AM/PM peak are plotted to show the variances within peak hours;

·         Travelers can choose the best time to avoid the highest peak hour.

 

Average Speed

·         Overall freeway performance of the past 30 days, 30 to 60 days peak hours can be easily read from the speedometers;

·         Freeway performance improvement can be observed by comparing the speedometers of different time periods.

 

Congestion

·         Yesterday AM/PM peak congestion level can be perceived from the pie charts.

 

Historical traffic can be animated to review and evaluate the past performance. Every frame is a 15-minute integrated traffic snapshot.

·         User customizable date and time range;

·         Adjustable playback speed and time;

·         Movable clock, legend, and panels to better organize the layout;

·         Traffic incident will fly-into its location one hour before its occurrence; Flash during its happening; Fade-out after its clearance to show its residual impact.

 

PMMS set up a series of nodes and divide Las Vegas Metropolitan freeways to corridors/sub-corridors, which helps traveler and professionals to follow specific freeway segments.

Corridor Dashboard

·         Similar dashboard shows the traffic condition of the specific corridor.

 

Corridor Traffic Plotting

·         Corridor traffic contour plotting can present traffic conditions of long stretch of freeway over a certain time period on one graph;

·         Large amount of spatial and temporal traffic information can be observed at the same time;      

·         Traffic pattern, trend, bottleneck, congestion level, impact of crashes can be easily observed;

·         Corridor origination and destination, date range, and measures are user customizable;

·         Measures include average speed, average lane volume, HOV or express lane speed and volume, general purpose lane speed and volume.

 

Congestion Storybook

·         User-friendly Interactive story book style;

·         Each page presents monthly typical congestion severity, extension and duration,  and travel times on Monday through Thursday, Friday, and weekend;

·         User can compare different months by selecting corresponding pages on the bottom.

 

Heavy Congestion (Bottleneck) Dashboard

·         Bottlenecks are predefined according to performance evaluation and field observation;

·         Dashboard shows more unreliable and lower speeds of bottlenecks.

 

NDOT and FAST implement radar or loop detectors about 1/3 mile along the urban freeway in Las Vegas Metropolitan Area. Detection data include traffic speed, volume, occupancy, and classified volumes by vehicle lengths, which are the major sources to monitor and evaluate the freeway performance.

 

·         Detectors are organized by freeways and listed by sequence;

·         Interactive map allows users to find and locate detectors;

·         User customizable interface allows users to select date range, time of day, day of week, and specific lanes;

·         Lane-by-lane plots help monitor the HOV and Express lanes usage and evaluate their performance;

·         Provide speed, volume and occupancy threshold parameters for TMC congestion management;

·         Classified vehicle counts provide data for the truck route and truck lane study;

·         Various plots exhibit the specific freeway segment characteristics from different perspectives;

·         Provide data for simulation, modeling and planning input and validation, and for work zone traffic control;

·         Monitor detector health and Identify malfunctioning detectors, controllers and communications.

 

NDOT and FAST implement and operate ramp meters at major interchange on-ramps. Most of them are operating at traffic responsive mode from 6:00 to 9:00 AM and 1:30 to 6:00 PM. Ramp volumes are collected by video/loop detection around the stop bar.

·         Interactive map allows users to find and locate ramp meters;

·         User customizable interface allows users to select date range, time of day, and day of week to draw plots or download data;

·         Help to identify and evaluate the ramp meter operation strategy, such as operation time, release rate and flushing;

·         Identify when the ramp meter is operating beyond its capacity and when flushes happen;

·         Help to adjust arterial signal timing to avoid over-spill;

·         Provide data for simulation and modeling input and validation, and for ramp meter design.

 

FAST TMC operators monitor and report incidents to the public. TMC operators record which lanes are blocked, tow truck arrival time and lane clearance time. This information is very critical for traffic impact study and incident clearance evaluation.

Operators report incident to the public through several ways:

1.       Add new incident by several simple clicks on the map, and then the incident is updated on the live traffic map which is available to public;

2.       Send out text and email message which is generated by PMMS;

3.       Terminate the incident when lanes are cleared. Then the incident will fade out on the live traffic map.

 

·         Query incidents by month and corridor;

·         Incident animation plays from one hour before the incident to one hour after its clearance to demonstrate the traffic condition and the impact before, during and after the incident;

·         Incident will fly-into its location one hour before its occurrence; Flash during its happening; Fade-out after its clearance to show its residual impact.

·         Help to identify the secondary crash;

·         Help to evaluate the incident clearance to improve future traffic incident management.