Iteris is excited to announce a new release for ClearGuide that now enables the Top Bottlenecks feature. This new feature allows users to easily: 

• Identify the worst-congested locations 
• Determine how often they occur (by color of bottleneck circle) 
• Assess and compare their impacts (by size of bottleneck circle) 

The Top Bottlenecks feature scores and ranks bottlenecks according to the impact they have on drivers. Users can select any date range and filter by day of week as well as the number of top bottlenecks to rank. The feature consists of a list of the Top Bottlenecks that are available to view over the whole day, during AM peak hours or PM peak hours. 

Users can click on a bottleneck in the list or on the map to see details for that bottleneck and determine how frequently the bottleneck caused queues on different parts of the roadway. 

How it works

Top Bottlenecks are sorted by a score that is calculated from the bottleneck frequency, number of minutes of delay it causes, and the average number of lanes along the bottleneck queue. The map shows the location of each bottleneck, sized according to its score, and colored by how many days it was active. 

Machine learning was implemented to spatially cluster the five-minute bottlenecks to improve the ranking. There is often minute-to-minute and day-to-day variation in downstream-most link of a bottleneck as detected from third-party probe data. Splitting these into separate bottleneck summaries makes it much harder to see where your worst congestion hotspots are happening.  

Potential use cases

• Prioritize projects by identifying the worst performing parts of the network overall, during the AM peak, and during the PM peak
• Monitor projects to see how a bottleneck changes in score and ranking following an improvement
• Track and report annual congestion stats to stakeholders

Other features released

As a part of this release, Iteris also included enhancements to the incident/crash integration map features to allow filtering by severity and default filtering to reduce clutter on the map.

The next improvements on the roadmap for this feature are to provide additional bottleneck details, such as queue and delay by time of day and on individual days.

The ClearGuide team would love to hear from you, If you have any questions or feedback on this feature or would like to learn more about ClearGuide, please contact us.

If you are a current ClearGuide user and do not see this feature in your instance, please have the ClearGuide project manager within your agency reach out to Iteris or you can contact us here.

About the Author:

James Esquivel is a marketing manager at Iteris.

Connect with James on LinkedIn.