Assessment of Link Reliability as a Function of Congestion Components
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 136, Issue 10
Abstract
Travelers’ perception of reliability of a road network is typically based on factors contributing to both recurring and nonrecurring congestion. However, literature documents little research to integrate, estimate and assess congestion using both these disparate congestion components. Integrating recurring and nonrecurring congestion components to estimate congestion helps address questions such as “How reliable are roads in the transportation network?” “Which path is more reliable to reach the destination from an origin within an on-time window during a certain time of the day?” The focus of this paper is to develop and illustrate the working of a methodology to estimate travel time and its variations, travel delay index due to crashes and their severity, congestion score and reliability of each link in the network. Traffic volume, link capacity, travel speed, crashes and their severity, and estimated time taken for normal traffic conditions to restore after a crash are used in the computations. Temporal variations in travel time and crashes for each link are also studied as travel demand and crash occurrence depend on the time of the day. Sensitivity analysis is also conducted to examine and assess reliability of links based on variations in weights to integrate recurring and nonrecurring congestion components. Data collected for the city of Charlotte in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina are used to demonstrate the methodology.
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Acknowledgments
The writers sincerely thank Charlie Jones and Anna Gallup of the City of Charlotte Department of Transportation, and Stephen Lowry of North Carolina Department of Transportation for their help with data required for this study.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 136 • Issue 10 • October 2010
Pages: 903 - 913
Copyright
© 2010 ASCE.
History
Received: Aug 3, 2009
Accepted: Mar 25, 2010
Published online: Mar 27, 2010
Published in print: Oct 2010
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