A generalized procedure for determining when street maintenance activities should be allowed

Street lane closures are necessary for the completion of transportation infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation projects, especially for a city as fast growing as Austin. It can be preplanned by allowing lanes to be closed when traffic demand is less than the remaining capacity of the streets for minimizing travel delay. The objective of this study is to consider all available 24-hour traffic volume counts available for Austin streets, compute lane and street capacities, and determine the daily hours when traffic demand could be served with a lane closed. Moreover, with these potential closure hours as a basis, identify geographic areas where streets have the same closure times. Traffic Analysis Zones (TAZ’s) were chosen to depict the geographic areas and six overlays were constructed using travel direction and street type to form sub-classes. The overlays were presented using ESRI ArcGIS, and later were exported to ArcGIS online to add searching and interactive capabilities. It was found that available traffic volume counts were sufficient to delineate some zones with streets of similar lane closure times, however, many streets had no count data available. Moreover, this methodology could be used to expand the overlays should traffic volume counts of more streets become available.