Traffic congestion and queues on urban road networks cause high delays for car drivers, buses, and also some
pedestrians. Traffic congestion and queues also generate air pollution which affects all road travellers and also
some non-travelling residents. Traffic control strategies seek to reduce at least some of these large negative
impacts. However, selecting the right control strategies is not a straightforward task, since road networks are
complex by nature, and their state depends on capacity-demand interactions, travel behaviour (including routeing
decisions), congestion dynamics and other dynamic and stochastic factors. In this paper we consider upstream-
gating merge-control. This strategy systematically protects specific sub-networks from long queues and
congestion without reducing overall network throughput. This paper contributes to the state of the art in
network-wide traffic control, taking explicit careful account of users’ response to control policies (including
routeing changes) in a rather simple way. The paper demonstrates in a network example both
(i) how the traffic equilibrium is affected by upstream-gating merge-control and also
(ii) how the dynamical evolution of traffic is affected by upstream-gating merge-control.
The paper shows how the upstream-gating merge-control can be easily tuned to reduce public transport delays.