Transportation data collection and dissemination practices in Delaware

Faghri, ArdeshirDelaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT) owns more than 90% of the roadways and majority of the traffic signals. To address the growing problem of congestion, delays, and overall traffic issues, DelDOT established the Transportation Management Center (TMC) in 1997. The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the global responsibilities of DelDOT-TMC and assess the process that TMC uses to gather, process, analyze, and distribute traffic and roadway weather data to the public. TMC coordinates and manages DelDOT’s response to any incident that influences the multimodal transportation system within the state of Delaware. Among other things, DelDOT-TMC collects traffic, roadway weather, and hydrological data by using over a thousand monitoring devices installed throughout the state of Delaware. After data has been obtained, TMC analyzes and disseminates real-time travel information to the public through DelDOT’s website (online interactive maps), smartphone application (DelDOT Mobile App), traffic advisory radio (WTMC 1380 AM), as well as multiple social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blog, and Flickr. This research presented a step-by-step guideline on the standard way of conducting traffic data collection set by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). This thesis reviewed manual and automatic methods of traffic counting and provided detailed information on traffic volume and vehicle classification studies. The purpose of presenting the manuals is to provide the standard data collection guidelines that all transportation management centers, including DelDOT-TMC, are required to follow when collecting traffic data. This research also provided a detailed analysis of DelDOT-TMC websites and compared it to selected Department of Transportation websites such as Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Texas, and Virginia. The purpose of the comparison was to analyze the data sources, accessibility, presentation formats, and style for each state and see how it compared to DelDOT-TMC. Although there were some similarities, there were two main differences that stood out the most. It was discovered that TMC Extranet had an extremely long website registration approval process than the other states and traffic counts provided is only in Portable Document Format (PDF). Also, TMC disseminated traffic and roadway weather information through the mobile application, among other sources, but Delaware’s hands-free law prevented drivers from using it. The overall results revealed that DelDOT-TMC provided limited traffic and roadway weather data, and presentation formats to the public compared to the other states.University of Delaware, Department of Civil and Environmental EngineeringM.C.E