01336869

Component

Analyzing the impacts of interventions like street-works, on-street parking, road closures, changes in speed limits, etc. on the capacity of the network is essential in understanding the causes of congestion. In this paper the authors present a framework to analyze the capacity impacts of such disruptive interventions using a microscopic traffic simulation based approach and apply it to determine capacities of two networks in Central London, United Kingdom using the traffic simulator MITSIMLab. A network is assumed to reach its capacity when no further vehicles can enter the network. To measure the capacity of a network in MITSIMLab, the network is flooded with vehicles till spill-back queue of vehicles start to form. This is done by systematically scaling the historical origin-destination (OD) matrix and determining the critical OD scaling factor. The critical OD matrix is then reloaded in the network and the total distance traveled by the vehicles in one hour are recorded and used to calculate a common capacity unit Passenger-Car-Unit (PCU)-km per hour. The use of this common capacity unit enables comparison of capacities across networks of different sizes and configurations. In the case studies, the proposed methodology is used to determine capacity drops due to street-works and near-side lane disruptions of varying complexities in two different study areas. The results reveal useful insights on relative impacts of these interventions on network capacity which can be useful for practitioners and researchers.

01329018

11-0340

English

22p

2011

Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Maps; References (28) ; Tables (6)

Highway capacity; Highway operations; Origin and destination; Traffic congestion; Traffic queuing; Traffic simulation

MITSIMLab (Computer program)

Interventions; Network capacity; Traffic disruption; Vehicle distance traveled

London (England)

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2011 Paper #11-0340

TRIS, TRB

Feb 17 2011 5:24PM