October 12, 2016

Joshua Nall

Subject: Proposal to address traffic congestion in the Charlotte area

Traffic congestion can affect many different aspects of everyday life. I plan to address congestion
and create a system to help traffic flow easily and deal with everyday commuting and rush hour
traffic, congestion caused by incidents, and construction.

Help traffic flow evenly

Create detours in traffic patterns
Manage congestion and delay time

Traffic makes people be late for work, miss appointments, and can cause harm if someone is
needing to get to a medical care facility quickly. While on the interstates or highways during
peak times like in the morning or afternoon when everyone is either coming into work or leaving
work, there are many cars on the roadways. A way to help this is for companies and Department
of Transportation (DOT) to work together to create flexible work hours for employees to limit
the amount of cars on the roads at the same time. Instead of having everyone be at work at 7:30,
you have people come in from 6:00 to 9:00 to control the flow of traffic.

Another way to help traffic flow is to create traffic lights that are smart lights. These
traffic pattern stop lights will use cameras on the stop lights that can view the flow of traffic and
depending on how the traffic is moving and at what speed, it will have an indicator on the
previous light. The usefulness of this would be so that if traffic is heavy on the upcoming light, a
commuter could divert to a different road or path to get to the destination faster and would be

someone not on the current roadway where there may be heavy congestion. An added benefit to
this is with having cameras on each stop light, accidents will be visible from every angle to
determine the cause of an incident.

Construction causes major delays that can hinder many commuters. A way that some of
the congestion can be helped is by doing major road construction in off peak hours, or during the
night if possible. At night there are fewer vehicles on the road and more work can be
accomplished.

My goal is to create a solution for the amount of congestion in major cities to and help
with issues at hand. In addition to improving ways congestion is handled on the roadways,
another helpful solution can be public transportation and how much it is used. There are many
possibilities to create a more efficient city.

References:
http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/congestion_report_04/congestion_report.pdf
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-114shrg94999/pdf/CHRG-114shrg94999.pdf
http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/gpo69422/NPS-CMS_Toolkit.pdf
http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/lps118026/fhwahop09015.pdf
http://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041017181717/http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/aboutus/one_pagers/corri
dor_trafficmgmt.htm