Operational impacts of incident quick clearance legislation: a simulation analysis

Many states in the US have enacted quick clearance laws requiring drivers of vehicles involved in minor incidents to move their vehicles from travel lanes prior to the arrival of first responders. Since little is known about the effectiveness of these laws, this research sought to find the benefit–cost ratio of advertising quick clearance legislation to improve driver compliance, and compare it with benefit–cost ratios of other incident management strategies, particularly traffic cameras, freeway service patrols, and traffic sensors. The analysis used traffic simulation that applied application programming interfaces to produce random spatial and temporal occurrence of incidents, including incident start times, durations, and locations, based on normal distributions developed from field data, to test before and after the law scenarios. The results provide decision makers with support for prioritizing funding between these incident management strategies and indicated that investments in the advertisement of this law was beneficial. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intelligent Electronic Systems in Commercial Vehicles for Enhanced Traffic Safety

Looking at the future trends of the road traffic, one will recognize that the commercial vehicle participation will not decrease, although it is required from the environmental and social viewpoints. The reason is that the other means of freight transport (water, railway, air) do not provide the same flexibility as the road transport, and direct business interest of those companies, who are using this transport form is larger than the eventual loss caused by the penalties to be paid (taxes, compensation of higher axle load). This conflict is hard to solve, but the effect can be minimized. The commercial vehicle industry attempts to introduce systems to the vehicles, which are targeting on reduction of the environmental impacts caused by heavy vehicles. These systems, which are named generally as “intelligent chassis systems”, electronically control the operation of the chassis subsystems (engine, transmission, brake, suspension) and co-ordinate their operation on a higher level (vehicle controller, intelligent control systems, such as adaptive cruise control, video camera based lane change recognition system, etc.). This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of the commercial vehicle chassis systems, and tries to project their future development.     

Evaluation of different contraflow strategies for hurricane evacuation in Charleston,South Carolina

Abstract

Limited specific evidence is available on the effectiveness of using contraflow as an evacuation traffic management tool. This study was conducted to determine the best combination of strategy options for evacuating Charleston, SC, along route I-26 during the event of a hurricane or other events. PARAMICS microscopic traffic simulator was used to evaluate the impact of each combination of evacuee response timing and traffic control strategy, such as contraflow, with respect to average vehicular travel time and evacuation duration. Analysis revealed the combination of management strategies that created the lowest evacuation durations and travel times for several types of anticipated evacuee responses. Furthermore, a proposed reconfiguration of the I-526/I-26 interchange for contraflow operations produced additional savings in travel times and evacuation durations. These findings support the use of all lanes for contraflow during all evacuations and provide justification to examine a possible reconfiguration of the I-526/I-26 interchange for use during evacuations.     

Development of a sensor system for traffic data collection

Although many types of traffic sensors are currently in use, all have some drawbacks, and widespread deployment of such sensor systems has been difficult due to high costs. Due to these deficiencies, there is a need to design and evaluate a low cost sensor system that measures both vehicle speed and counts. Fulfilling this need is the primary objective of this research. Compared to the many existing infrared-based concepts that have been developed for traffic data collection, the proposed method uses a transmission-based type of optical sensor rather than a reflection-based type. Vehicles passing between sensors block transmission of the infrared signal, thus indicating the presence of a vehicle. Vehicle speeds are then determined using the known distance between multiple pairs of sensors. A prototype of the sensor system, which uses laser diode and photo detector pairs with the laser directly projected onto the photo detector, was first developed and tested in the laboratory. Subsequently this experimental prototype was implemented for field testing. The traffic flow data collected were compared to manually collected vehicle speed and traffic counts and a statistical analysis was done to evaluate the accuracy of the sensor system. The analysis found no significant difference between the data generated by the sensor system and the data collected manually at a 95% confidence interval. However, the testing scenarios were limited and so further analysis is necessary to determine the applicability in more congested urban areas. The proposed sensor system, with its simple technology and low cost, will be suitable for saturated deployment to form a densely distributed sensor network and can provide unique support for efficient traffic incident management. Additionally, because it may be quickly installed in the field without the need of elaborate fixtures, it may be deployed for use in temporary traffic management applications such as traffic management in road work zones or during special events.     

Real-time traveler information for urban arterials: a method for selecting metropolitan routes of significance

Although multi-criteria analysis (MCA) has been commonly used to guide transportation decisions related to traditional infrastructure, limited applications are reported for intelligent transportation systems. The objective of this study is to apply MCA for selecting arterial routes for real-time traveler information, to conform with recent US federal regulations. This study applies the method in two metropolitan areas and the paper describes which criteria were chosen and how important each were considered. In all, this study guided the selection of seven arterial routes for deployment of real-time traveler information collection and dissemination. This study demonstrates how a transportation agency can apply MCA for traveler information planning and the method provides value for other agencies seeking to come into compliance with traveler information regulations.