NO PROGRESS WITHOUT SUFFERING: DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF HIGHWAY TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT IN THE NETHERLANDS

Congestion on the Dutch highway network has become a serious problem in the last decades. Policies to substitute car traffic to other transport modes have been hardly successful, as is the case in many countries. Due to intensive land-use and environmental considerations the extension of the existing highway network, i.e. by building new highways, has been limited and is not considered as a feasible option to alleviate the congestion problems in the Netherlands. As a consequence, much effort has been put in achievement of more efficient use of the existing highway infrastructure by traffic management. New stretches of highway are only built if no other options exist. The aim of this paper is threefold. First, the authors will describe what has been achieved in the Netherlands in highway traffic management systems in the last decades. Secondly, they will describe how traffic mangers currently operate in traffic management centres (TMCs). Finally, they will show that although more efficient use of the existing highway infrastructure has already been achieved by a number of measures, improvements are attainable if policies are developed and implemented, which give priority to certain road user groups or to certain connections and roads. Thus, the paper will demonstrate how we move from local traffic management to network traffic management.