Impact of On-Ramp Traffic Flow Arrival Profile on Queue Length at Metered On-Ramps
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 145, Issue 2
Abstract
At a metered on-ramp, a vehicle queue will be formed in front of the ramp meter when on-ramp demand exceeds the ramp-metering capacity. It is therefore important to provide adequate queue storage space to prevent ramp queue from spilling to the upstream feeding facility, particularly when a metered on-ramp is retrofitted to an existing unmetered ramp. This paper investigates the impact of on-ramp traffic flow arrival profile on queue length at four metered on-ramp types. Based on field investigations at 13 ramp-metering locations, it was found that a higher demand-to-capacity ratio might not automatically lead to more queue storage needs; this nonlinear relationship indicated that queue length tends to be affected by the stochastic nature of on-ramp traffic flow. An analytical approach was then employed to model the on-ramp traffic flow arrival profile at each metered on-ramp type; results revealed that the on-ramp traffic flow arrival profile affected the queuing process at metered on-ramps. Finally, the microsimulation method was used to simulate queue lengths under various demand-to-capacity ratio scenarios at each metered on-ramp type. It was found that the queue generated by the random on-ramp traffic flow arrival profile at Type 4 metered on-ramps was up to 30% shorter than the queue generated by the nonrandom on-ramp traffic flow arrival profiles at Types 1, 2, and 3 metered on-ramps. The platoon dispersion effect at Type 3 metered on-ramps reduced queue length by up to 19.6% in comparison with Type 1 metered on-ramps; simulated queue length at Type 2 metered on-ramps was found to be 5.3% shorter than at Type 1 metered on-ramps.
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Acknowledgments
This research was sponsored by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), Grant No. 65A0486. The authors thank Larry Hall and Leo Anselmo of Caltrans District 3, Afsaneh Razavi of Caltrans District 7 and Jose Perez of Caltrans Division of Research, Innovation, and System Information (DRISI) for their help with the site selection and data collection; Arafat Khan, Anabel Hernandez, Daniel Rodriguez, and Yue Zhao of the University of Nevada, Reno for help with the data extraction.
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Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 145 • Issue 2 • February 2019
Copyright
©2018 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 25, 2018
Accepted: Aug 8, 2018
Published online: Dec 5, 2018
Published in print: Feb 1, 2019
Discussion open until: May 5, 2019
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