The Highway Capacity Manual 6th Edition: A Guide for Multimodal Mobility Analysis

In designing new highways or redesigning existing ones, it is essential to evaluate congested operations, to consider multiple modes and their interactions, and to use a variety of performance measures and tools, including simulation. To highlight those elements, the sixth edition of the Transportation Research Board's Highway Capacity Manual (HCM), scheduled for publication in 2016, will have the subtitle, "A Guide for Multimodal Mobility Analysis.” This edition of the HCM describes performance measures for various modes and facilities in addition to the well-known level of service (LOS). It provides travel time estimates for freeway systems in addition to urban streets, and performance measures for pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users. This article provides an overview of the new edition and will familiarize practitioners and researchers with the set of analysis tools in the new HCM.