Did California’s hand-held cell phone ban reduce accidents?

On July 1st, 2008, California enacted a ban on hand-held cell phone use while driving. Using California Highway Patrol panel accident data for California freeways from January 1st, 2008 to December 31st, 2008, we examine whether this policy reduced the number of accidents on California highways. To control for unobserved time-varying effects that could be correlated with the ban, we use high-frequency data and a regression discontinuity design. We find no evidence that the ban on hand-held cell phone use led to a reduction in traffic accidents.     

Adapt-Traf: An adaptive multiagent road traffic management system based on hybrid ant-hierarchical fuzzy model

Usually, road networks are characterized by their great dynamics including different entities in interactions. This leads to more complex road traffic management. This paper proposes an adaptive multiagent system based on the ant colony behavior and the hierarchical fuzzy model. This system allows adjusting efficiently the road traffic according to the real-time changes in road networks by the integration of an adaptive vehicle route guidance system. The proposed system is implemented and simulated under a multiagent platform in order to discuss the improvement of the global road traffic quality in terms of time, fluidity and adaptivity.     

Is equilibrium in transport pure Nash,mixed or Stochastic?

The classical theory of transport equilibrium is based on the Wardrop’s first principle that describes a Nash User Equilibrium (UE), where in no driver can unilaterally change routes to improve his/her travel times. A growing number of economic laboratory experiments aiming at testing Nash-Wardrop equilibrium have shown that the Pure Strategy Nash Equilibrium (PSNE) is not able to explain the observed strategic choices well. In addition even though Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibrium (MSNE) has been found to fit better the observed aggregate choices, it does not explain the variance in choices well. This study analyses choices made by users in three different experiments involving strategic interactions in endogenous congestion to evaluate equilibrium prediction. We compare the predictions of the PSNE, MSNE and Stochastic User Equilibrium (SUE). In SUE, the observed variations in choices are assumed to be due to perception errors. The study proposes a method to iteratively estimate SUE models on choice data with strategic interactions. Among the three sets of experimental data the SUE approach was found to accurately predict the average choices, as well as the variances in choices. The fact that the SUE model was found to accurately predict variances in choices, suggests its applicability for transport equilibrium models that attempt to evaluate reliability in transportation systems. This finding is fundamental in the effort to determining a behaviourally consistent paradigm to model equilibrium in transport networks. The study also finds that Fechner error which is the inverse of the scale parameter in the SUE model is affected by the group sizes and the complexity of the cost function. In fact, the larger group sizes and complexity of cost functions increased the variability in choices. Finally, from an experimental design standpoint we show that it is not possible to estimate a noise parameter associate to Fechner error in the case when the choices are equally probable.     

A traffic-condition-based route guidance strategy for a single destination road network

Most of existing route guidance strategies achieves user optimal equilibrium by comparing travel time. Measuring travel time, however, might be uneasy on an urban road network. To contend with the issue, the paper mainly considers easily obtained inflow and outflow of a link and road capacity as input, and proposes a route guidance strategy for a single destination road network based on the determination of free-flow or congested conditions on alternative routes. An extended strategy for a complex network and a feedback approximation for avoiding forecast are further explored. Weaknesses of the strategy are also explicitly analyzed. To test the strategy, simulation investigations are conducted on two networks with multiple parallel routes. The results indicate that the strategy is able to provide stable splitting rates and to approximate user optimal equilibrium in different conditions, in particular when traffic demand is high. This strategy has potential to be applied in an urban road network due to its simplicity and easily obtained input data. The strategy is also applicable for single destination if some alternatives and similar routes are available.     

Efficient missing data imputing for traffic flow by considering temporal and spatial dependence

The missing data problem remains as a difficulty in a diverse variety of transportation applications, e.g. traffic flow prediction and traffic pattern recognition. To solve this problem, numerous algorithms had been proposed in the last decade to impute the missed data. However, few existing studies had fully used the traffic flow information of neighboring detecting points to improve imputing performance. In this paper, probabilistic principle component analysis (PPCA) based imputing method, which had been proven to be one of the most effective imputing methods without using temporal or spatial dependence, is extended to utilize the information of multiple points. We systematically examine the potential benefits of multi-point data fusion and study the possible influence of measurement time lags. Tests indicate that the hidden temporal–spatial dependence is nonlinear and could be better retrieved by kernel probabilistic principle component analysis (KPPCA) based method rather than PPCA method. Comparison proves that imputing errors can be notably reduced, if temporal–spatial dependence has been appropriately considered.     

An evaluation framework for traffic calming measures in residential areas

The paper evaluates the effectiveness of various traffic calming measures from the perspectives of traffic performance and safety, and environmental and public health impacts. The proposed framework was applied to four calming measures – two types of speed humps, speed tables, and chicanes – to demonstrate its usefulness and applicability. A field experiment using probe vehicles equipped with global positioning system devices was conducted to obtain vehicle trajectory data for use in more realistic simulations. In addition, a recently developed vehicle emissions model was used for more accurate evaluation of environmental and public health impacts. The results show that chicane is better than the other types of traffic calming measures considered, except in terms of vehicle emissions.     

The impact of road traffic noise on urban protected areas: A landscape modeling approach

We modeled the propagation of traffic noise over the landscape and analyzed its impact on the structure and configuration of protected areas of the Twin Cities Metro Region, Minnesota. Using four noise thresholds, we found that at low and medium noise levels, 19% and 11% of the protected areas are within the road-effect zone. Using mean patch area and patch shape index, we measured the acoustic fragmentation of habitats. We found that at higher levels of noise patch shape index increased, while mean patch size decreased. The acoustic diversity of a patch is also found to be correlated with land cover type, patch area, and patch shape.     

基于Gb接口信令分析的深圳站进路预告故障处理

进路预告信息通过GPRS网络传递,是CTC与CIR之间传输的重要业务之一,是保障铁路运输安全的重要手段.围绕广深线深圳站进路预告接收异常问题,进行故障定位,判断为因CIR发生小区重选导致短暂脱网丢包,从而影响到深圳站进路预告接收,为此提出调整天线倾角及重选参数的优化方案,为相关铁路单位运维工作提供参考.     

几何设计对快速路立交匝道行车安全性的影响

由于城市快速路转向交通流量大、线形设计标准低,快速路立交匝道成为交通事故的多发点。利用上海市快速路3年事故数据和交通流量检测数据,以上海市浦西地区快速路立交匝道为研究对象,根据车辆在匝道上的行驶特征以及车辆交互特性,将立交匝道划分成出口段、衔接段和入口段及左转匝道、右转匝道等5个研究单元,针对各单元分别建立负二项模型分析匝道几何设计及其组合参数、交通流特征对于安全的影响。结果表明,出口段及入口段的安全性与几何特征的联系较为紧密;迂回式左转匝道相较于右转匝道受几何线形影响大;流量越大、长度越长,事故风险越高,但出口段的长度与事故发生呈负相关关系;出口处为直线、入口处存在长直下坡路段、入口处线形与主线差异大的立交匝道安全性差;迂回式左转匝道上存在过小半径曲线,特别是将小半径曲线设置在出口处,会极大增加事故几率。     

Experimental and empirical investigations of traffic flow instability

Traffic instability is an important but undesirable feature of traffic flow. This paper reports our experimental and empirical studies on traffic flow instability. We have carried out a large scale experiment to study the car-following behavior in a 51-car-platoon. The experiment has reproduced the phenomena and confirmed the findings in our previous 25-car-platoon experiment, i.e., standard deviation of vehicle speeds increases in a concave way along the platoon. Based on our experimental results, we argue that traffic speed rather than vehicle spacing (or density) might be a better indicator of traffic instability, because vehicles can have different spacing under the same speed. For these drivers, there exists a critical speed between 30 km/h and 40 km/h, above which the standard deviation of car velocity is almost saturated (flat) along the 51-car-platoon, indicating that the traffic flow is likely to be stable. In contrast, below this critical speed, traffic flow is unstable and can lead to the formation of traffic jams. Traffic data from the Nanjing Airport Highway support the experimental observation of existence of a critical speed. Based on these findings, we propose an alternative mechanism of traffic instability: the competition between stochastic factors and the so-called speed adaptation effect, which can better explain the concave growth of speed standard deviation in traffic flow.