Bottleneck Buster

Her sudden predicament, shared by countless Baltimore commuters, was highlighted in a recent study led by Xianfeng “Terry” Yang, right, a UMD civil engineering professor who specializes in traffic operations and safety.

Comparing traffic flow during two-week periods before and after a container ship slammed into the bridge, Yang found 50% increases and eight-mile bottlenecks clogging Baltimore’s interstates; some commutes doubled while others tripled. Many jams formed at the exchange between I-895 and I-95—the source of the Harbor Tunnel gridlock—while others choked the I-95 southbound lanes near the northern stretch of beltway. A 58% rise in travel time for delivery trucks translated into 1.1 million additional travel hours per year and $93 million more in operating costs.

Yang’s collaborators at Morgan State University, meanwhile, fanned out across bridge-adjacent communities to surveys residents: They found an outsize effect on people from low-income neighborhoods, who reported higher concerns about traffic safety and were more likely to want to relocate.

The study, funded by a $200,000 National Science Foundation grant, relied on data from the Maryland State Highway Administration, the Baltimore Department of Transportation and UMD’s Center for Advanced Transportation Technology, which tracks up-to-the-minute traffic metrics across the globe.

In December, Yang helped secure a $2 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration, shared by Morgan State and architecture-engineering firm Mead & Hunt, to develop a solution. In coming months, the team will replace several dozen outdated and malfunctioning traffic signal control boxes at intersections near the bridge. After installing sensors at 25 key intersections to gauge new traffic patterns, the researchers will integrate the data and stream it onto a city-run dashboard, helping officials adjust traffic signal timers in real-time to improve flow and decrease emissions.

In a separate project, Yang last August received a $400,000 Federal Highway Administration grant to study safety effects of the bridge collapse, pinpoint new hotspots for car crashes and share them with Baltimore authorities.

Yang stresses that it’s important to step away from abstract data sometimes and engage with struggling communities. “We’re not done,” he says. “We want to work with Baltimore to figure out a traffic-management solution and save a few minutes of residents’ travel time.”