Exploring Traffic End-of-Queue in a Temporal Spatial Diagram and Applications for Work Zone Safety Analysis
Vehicle queue presence and the location of the end-of-queue as a result of work zones and incidents is important for traffic management and can be acquired from inspecting each vehicle’s actual trajectory in a time-space diagram. Since tracking individual vehicles’ trajectories continuously requires a significant effort in data collection and processing, especially for a work zone with high traffic demand, this study applies speed contour maps generated from analyzing detector data around a work zone site to examine traffic at a macroscopic level and obtain queue information. Analysis techniques for identifying queue observation space (QOS) and work zone impact time on speed contour maps are proposed and assessed. Moreover, instead of counting collision events to evaluate work zone safety, an index considering end-of-queue and prevailing traffic conditions was presented. This safety surrogate is advantageous to be able to assess the safety of work zones during the planning phase, rather than after-the-fact, based on crash data. Applications of the proposed techniques on speed contour maps from a solid experimental simulation design revealed beneficial results related to QOS, average shockwave speed and safety impacts when work zones were scheduled at various times of the day with prevailing traffic conditions for freeway management.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB55 Work Zone Traffic Control
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Chou, Chih-Sheng
- Nichols, Andrew P
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2012-1-22 to 2012-1-26
- Date: 2012
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 20p
- Monograph Title: TRB 91st Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Case studies; Contour maps; Microscopic traffic flow; Traffic queuing; Traffic simulation; Traffic speed; Work zone safety
- Identifier Terms: VISSIM (Computer model)
- Subject Areas: Highways; Maintenance and Preservation; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; I60: Maintenance; I70: Traffic and Transport;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01371151
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 12-3423
- Files: TRIS, TRB
- Created Date: May 25 2012 9:32AM