Overview
This document provides guidance to state and local transportation personnel who wish to develop a formal program for mitigating congestion using localized and lowcost bottleneck treatments. It presents several templates for developing a localized congestion mitigation program, including documenting alternative templates in use by state Departments of Transportation and Metropolitan Planning Organizations.
FHWA’s Localized Bottleneck Reduction Initiative (LBR) program has researched over the last five years the causes, impacts, and mitigations available to combat localized recurring congestion; that is, congestion that is primarily “point specific” as to cause, location, duration, and repetitiveness. This guidance document is intended to aid agencies in establishing either ad-hoc or annualized programs that address localized congestion, much in the same way that an annualized safety-spot program would address localized safety issues.
The main questions that this guidance helps an agency frame are:
1.Do we have a satisfactory agency methodology to specifically address localized congestion problems?
2.Within that program, do we have satisfactory justifications for project candidacy, selection, and solutions for said problems?
3.Are we executing these projects in a timely fashion and within budgets that are representative of the context of a “Localized Bottleneck Reduction”program?