The effectiveness of OTM for municipalities
Online Traffic Management
As a road user, you probably recognize them: the yellow reflective signs along the road when there are roadworks, with information about the street that is closed and which route you should follow now. Nowadays, people use navigation much more often to get to a place, even when there are roadworks. In addition, there is of course always commuter traffic that does not use navigation for daily routes and therefore drives towards the roadworks without knowing it. Online traffic management (OTM) is a service of TripService that continues work in navigation systems such as Google Maps, Waze and Flitsmeister, but also informs commuters about the road closures via social media and advertisements.The aim of this is for people to think in advance about other means of travel, to leave earlier or later, to stay at home, or to adjust their route in order to ensure that they can avoid the location of the work. This is very useful for work on major roads, but also in municipalities. In built-up areas there are often more roads and therefore more route options, there is less space (and road capacity) and many people live along the roads. The ideal would be to ensure that there are no congestions anywhere by diverting traffic as effectively as possible, to ensure in advance that there is less traffic and that residents are inconvenienced as little as possible by (cut-through) traffic.
Follow this blog and my graduation research
I am Joris Ruiter, a student of Civil Engineering at the University of Twente and during my graduation internship at TripService I will look at the effectiveness of Online Traffic Management at municipal level. I want to look at as many perspectives as possible. This includes the numbers and figures; decrease in traffic in general, increase in traffic on diversion routes, reach of the advertising campaigns, but also the opinions and experiences of the parties involved: what do road users think of the communication, are
there complaints from residents and is the road manager satisfied with the diversions? I will be working on this research for the next 10 weeks and I will provide updates on this in this blog!
