Spatial Transferability Testing of Dummy Variable Winter Weather Model Using Traffic Data Collected from Five Geographically Dispersed Weigh-in-Motion Sites in Alberta Highway Systems
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 146, Issue 11
Abstract
It has been an engineering practice that highway agencies collect traffic data using highway traffic monitoring techniques such as permanent traffic counts (PTCs) and weigh in motion (WIM). This research used the WIM traffic data collected for from one of six WIM sites installed and operated in the Alberta provincial highway network to develop a winter weather dummy variable model. Five other sites were used for a spatial transferability test of the estimated model. Few past studies have tested empirically whether a winter weather model developed for one site can be transferred spatially to other locations. A goal of this paper is to develop a winter weather dummy variable model using winter season traffic and weather data and then test its spatial transferability by applying the model to other geographically dispersed locations. A total of 16,746,310 vehicular records collected for spanning from 2005 to 2010 at a WIM site on a commuter road near the City of Leduc, Alberta, Canada, were used to calibrate a model. Three vehicle classes such as total traffic, passenger cars, and truck traffic were classified from raw WIM data and used for model development. Using four types of model structures differentiated from the initially developed model for each vehicle class, this research performed spatial transferability. This research shows that the developed dummy variable model can be successfully spatially transferred to the other five WIM sites. More accurate traffic estimates can be made during winter seasons by using other model structures for each vehicle type.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request:
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Data set for parametric and nonparametric modeling conducted in the study; and
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Raw weather and traffic data collected from WIM site and weather stations.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Alberta Transportation for providing the WIM data utilized for this study.
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© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 15, 2019
Accepted: Jun 17, 2020
Published online: Sep 4, 2020
Published in print: Nov 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Feb 4, 2021
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