01049514

Component

Although traffic is inherently stochastic, in practice the arterial signal timings are designed for traffic volumes measured in a single time interval. The timing plans are then executed for months and years until retiming is warranted due to prominent performance deficiency. This procedures is a practical alternative to an expensive collection of traffic volumes. This paper presents a procedure of evaluating various strategies of accounting for traffic variability in arterial coordination design when available traffic volume data are limited. The paper first presents a method of expanding a single day’s traffic counts into multiple days by utilizing an adequate econometric model of traffic variability. This method, if implemented as a convenient add-in to existing signal optimization packages such as Synchro, can be used to evaluate the robustness of signal solutions to traffic variability in longer periods. Second, the method is illustrated by evaluating several strategies of accounting for traffic variability for existing arterial streets based on the expanded sets of volumes. It has been found that for under-saturated arterial streets, different strategies result in quite different solutions while the performance of the arterial street remains similar in all the strategies. For congested arterial streets, the performance can vary considerably across strategies and a certain strategy may work better than other.

01042056

07-1553

English

25p

2007

Transportation Research Board 86th Annual Meeting

CD-ROM

Figures (8) ; References (22) ; Tables (6)

Arterial highways; Operations; Saturation flow; Traffic counts; Traffic data; Traffic flow; Traffic signal controllers; Traffic signal intervals; Traffic signal timing; Traffic volume

Travel time variability

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

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2007 Paper #07-1553

TRIS, TRB

Feb 8 2007 6:11PM