01371151

Component

Vehicle queue presence and the location of the end-of-queue as a result of work zones and incidents is important for traffic management and can be acquired from inspecting each vehicle’s actual trajectory in a time-space diagram. Since tracking individual vehicles’ trajectories continuously requires a significant effort in data collection and processing, especially for a work zone with high traffic demand, this study applies speed contour maps generated from analyzing detector data around a work zone site to examine traffic at a macroscopic level and obtain queue information. Analysis techniques for identifying queue observation space (QOS) and work zone impact time on speed contour maps are proposed and assessed. Moreover, instead of counting collision events to evaluate work zone safety, an index considering end-of-queue and prevailing traffic conditions was presented. This safety surrogate is advantageous to be able to assess the safety of work zones during the planning phase, rather than after-the-fact, based on crash data. Applications of the proposed techniques on speed contour maps from a solid experimental simulation design revealed beneficial results related to QOS, average shockwave speed and safety impacts when work zones were scheduled at various times of the day with prevailing traffic conditions for freeway management.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB55 Work Zone Traffic Control

01362476

12-3423

English

20p

2012

Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Case studies; Contour maps; Microscopic traffic flow; Traffic queuing; Traffic simulation; Traffic speed; Work zone safety

VISSIM (Computer model)

Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; I60: Maintenance; I70: Traffic and Transport

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2012 Paper #12-3423

TRIS, TRB

Feb 8 2012 5:16PM