Peripheral productivity: The key to success for the HCM

Abstract

"Peripheral productivity" refers to the methodology which has paralleled the development of the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) to improve the productivity by which the HCM techniques are applied. This is a very important subject for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that it enables the user to achieve more with a given level of resources. The second, and perhaps more subtle, is that it provides a much higher volume of test data by which existing models may be refined and new ones may be investigated. Peripheral productivity has been concentrated largely in the area of signalized intersection analysis (HCM Chapter 9). The main reason is that the Chapter 9 methodology is simply not practical to implement without automated assistance. Several developers have produced software which claims to perform a faithful implementation of the HCM technique. This paper goes beyond the routine software for performing capacity analysis. It considers several new peripheral features which have been developed recently and are not yet familiar to most HCM users.