Traffic Management

This report examines whether a Traffic Frustration Index, which quantifies the events which contribute to driver frustration, would be a useful supplement to measures such as traffic speed and flow in identifying priorities for traffic management interventions and assessing the outcomes of such interventions. The report, covering the four stages of the project, documents the results of a literature review, a laboratory experiment to quantify situations which drivers regard as frustrating, the development of a Traffic Frustration Index model of different types of frustrating events and an evaluation of the model through its application to a number of traffic routes. The project determined that there was a very close correlation between the Traffic Frustration Index and travel speed and good correlation between user ratings on how well certain roads performed and the Traffic Frustration Index. Although it was demonstrated that different types of traffic events have different impacts on driver frustration, the aggregate of these events correlates closely with traffic speed and adds little to the prediction of overall driver satisfaction.