<![CDATA[Urban traffic forecasting underpins the mitigation of congestion, enhancement of road safety, and reduction of emissions in intelligent transportation systems. We benchmark Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) models on the Metro Interstate Traffic Volume dataset under an identical preprocessing and training pipeline for a fair comparison. Using a 24-hour multivariate input window (temperature, rainfall, snowfall, cloud cover), LSTM delivers the best overall balance of accuracy and efficiency on the full test sequence (RMSE = 0.196, MAPE = 2.36%, R² = 0.480; 7,344 s training). Bi-LSTM achieves competitive short-window accuracy but underperforms on the full sequence (RMSE = 0.231, MAPE = 2.92%, R² = 0.280; 12,672 s training). We attribute the Bi-LSTM gap to prediction "flattening" over long horizons, i.e., over-smoothed peaks from bidirectional averaging, despite its slightly stronger short-segment fit. Compared with prior RNN/GRU/CNN baselines on the same data, LSTM improves variance explanation while remaining deployable for near-real-time use. We also examine seasonality (daily/weekly cycles), weather effects, and data imbalance (peak versus off-peak) as factors that shape model error. These results support LSTM as a practical default for city-scale forecasting and motivate future work with attention/Transformer encoders and richer exogenous signals (incidents, events). The findings inform policy by enabling proactive traffic management that can reduce delays, emissions, and crash risk through earlier, data-driven interventions.]]>
