A Proposal for a New Design Load Concept for Highway Infrastructures
This paper proposes a design load concept that treats capacity and traffic flow as random variables. This contrasts with the nth-hourly-volume concept (e. g. 30th hourly volume), which neglects the highest traffic volumes, and produces a disproportionate share of the social or generalized costs of any facility. The paper shows that the traffic flow is normally distributed within time windows, but varies in the standard deviation depending on the volume to capacity ratio. A new definition of capacity is given and estimated for an example. The method estimates the probabilities of traffic flow being larger than the capacity for any given scenario. This reserve capacity is linked to breakdown probabilities, queue lengths and therefore generalized costs of facility use. These results could easily be integrated into a cost-benefit analysis, which systematically focuses on the most expensive situations.
-
Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Axhausen, Kay W
- Bernard, Michael
-
Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 85th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2006-1-22 to 2006-1-26
- Date: 2006
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: CD-ROM
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 14p
- Monograph Title: TRB 85th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers CD-ROM
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Benefit cost analysis; Design load; Highway capacity; Highway facilities; Infrastructure; Peak hour traffic; Time; Traffic flow; Traffic volume
- Uncontrolled Terms: Traffic queue length
- Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01023198
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 06-0869
- Files: TRIS, TRB
- Created Date: Mar 3 2006 10:30AM