01024467

Component

Highway planning efforts, especially those involving capacity expansions, have traditionally relied on the volume/capacity (V/C) ratio to identify “highly congested” or critical links, resulting in localized solutions that do not consider system-wide impacts. This paper presents a new, comprehensive, system-wide approach to identifying critical links and evaluating network performance. The approach considers network flows, link capacity and network topology. Using three hypothetical networks, we demonstrate that the approach, known as the Network Robustness Index, yields different highway planning solutions than the traditional V/C ratio. Moreover, these solutions yield far greater system-wide benefits, as measured by travel-time savings, than solutions identified by the V/C ratio.

01020180

06-2231

English

13p

2006

Transportation Research Board 85th Annual Meeting

CD-ROM

References; Tables (1)

Highway capacity; Highway planning; Traffic congestion; Transportation planning; Travel time

Network Robustness Index

Highway capacity models; Network flows; Transportation networks; Volume-to-capacity ratio (Traffic)

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

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2006 Paper #06-2231

TRIS, TRB

Mar 3 2006 10:55AM