Traffic engineering designs transportation systems for safer, efficient, and convenient travel. It manages bridges, roads, railroads, traffic lights, and uses advanced technologies to manage traffic patterns. Its history dates back to ancient empires, and it became more important in the 20th century with the advent of automobiles. Traffic flow management is a huge project, and modern communication and sensor equipment have provided more information tools to simulate traffic flows in real-time. The NAVIGATOR system in Atlanta is an advanced traffic management system that uses CCTV cameras, radar, video detectors, traffic metering, and changeable signs to manage traffic.
Traffic engineering is a field of study that encompasses a number of civil engineering disciplines. It is involved in designing transportation systems, with the goal of creating safer, more efficient and more convenient systems for the world. Traffic engineering traditionally manages things like bridges, roads, and railroads, as well as traffic lights, signals, and other signals. Modern traffic engineering also uses more advanced technologies, such as traffic sensors, dynamic signage, and central computers to manage traffic patterns in an effort to relieve congestion.
The history of traffic engineering can be traced back thousands of years to the great highways of old empires, such as Rome. Early roads were built to last under the constant progress of humans and horses and were generally designed to last for hundreds of years. Traffic flows weren’t a problem until much later, when densely populated city centers experienced bottlenecks and dangerous traffic patterns, even in the era of horse-drawn carriages. The broad streets were adopted to try and limit this problem and in response to the use of narrow streets as barricades during many of the great 19th century revolutions.
In the early and mid-20th century, with the advent of the automobile, traffic engineering became an even more important discipline. In the United States, traffic engineering saw a huge boom in the 1920s. In 1950, the Federal-Aid Highway Act was passed, setting the stage for a national interstate highway system, based loosely on the German Autobahn. Early traffic engineering in the United States thus centered largely on strategic decisions, as an interstate system was seen as necessary for a safer homeland.
As traffic has increased in the United States and abroad, particularly in urban areas, new areas of study in traffic engineering have opened up. The limited space within cities for roads made them particularly susceptible to bottlenecks, as they simply could not be expanded continuously, as became the norm for the interstate system in more rural and suburban areas. Traffic flow management has become a huge project, as engineers have sought to simulate and model traffic to best predict where lights should be placed, how they should be timed, and how roads should be moved to increase transportation efficiency.
Modern communication and sensor equipment has provided a huge benefit to traffic engineering by providing more information tools to simulate traffic flows in real time. One particularly advanced system that was introduced early on was the NAVIGATOR, or Advanced Transportation Management System. It was built in Atlanta ahead of the 1996 Olympic Games in an effort to minimize the negative impact of an additional two million visitors on Atlanta’s already exploding traffic network.
The NAVIGATOR system uses more than 450 CCTV cameras to monitor traffic and huge batteries of radar and video detectors to quickly identify incidents or snarls so action can be taken. The system was also one of the largest initial implementations of traffic metering on ramps, allowing cars to ramp up gradually to relieve congestion and stop traffic on the Interstate itself. More than fifty changeable signs and information kiosks scattered throughout the city complete the system, allowing central controllers to dynamically move the network and immediately alert motorists of changes.
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