01476734

Component

Traffic calming measures are effective in enhancing traffic safety by reducing vehicle speeds. A variety of studies have evaluated the effectiveness of traffic calming measures to derive useful insights into the design and operations. Unlike existing studies focusing on either traffic performance measures or environmental impacts of the traffic calming devices, this study proposes a comprehensive evaluation framework based on microscopic traffic simulations, which enables more reliable and systematic identification of benefits for calming measures. The proposed framework evaluates the effectiveness of various traffic calming measures through three major perspectives including traffic performance, traffic safety, and environmental and public health impact. Four different traffic calming measures, two types of speed humps, speed tables, and chicanes, were applied to the proposed framework to demonstrate its usefulness and applicability. A field experiment using probe vehicles equipped with a global positioning systems (GPS) device were conducted to obtain vehicle trajectory data to be used for more realistic simulations. Also, a recently developed vehicle emissions model was used to evaluate environmental and public health impacts. Results show that speed tables and chicanes outperform others. It is expected that the outcome of this study will be a valuable decision making tool for evaluating traffic calming measures.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB50 Traffic Control Devices.

01470560

13-3265

English

19p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Photos; References; Tables

Decision making; Environmental impacts; Global Positioning System; Microsimulation; Performance measurement; Probe vehicles; Traffic calming; Traffic safety

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; I73: Traffic Control

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-3265

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:40PM