University of California Transportation Center

In recent years, transportation research has revealed that problems of widespread congestion cannot be solved by building more roads or by expanding existing infrastructure. A significant part of the solution lies in better management of traffic. One of the principal thrusts of the new national program on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is Advanced Transportation Management Systems (ATMS).

To facilitate better management, recent research has focused on continuous monitoring of traffic to ascertain the 'normal' level of congestion and to provide an understanding of how it forms and spreads. Techniques for rapidly detecting incidents have become a vital link in the management of traffic.